Hunter Pence knocked in three runs when this ball left his broken bat after a crazy series of three collisions – the last of which caused it to swerve in the air and bound past the outstretched glove of the shortstop.

Second-year Cardinals shortstop Pete Kozma, who was very well positioned, reacted at lightning speed, but was caught going the wrong way for a fraction of a second because the third point of contact changed the ball’s direction.

The Triple Kiss happened in less than half a second. Watching it live, as broadcast, I had no idea the ball hit the bat three times; not until seeing it like this.

I knew it was a broken bat hit, my shoulders slumped at the same instant that Kozma jumped – and then suddenly, the ball took a crazy turn in the air and, as if it had eyes, bounced past the outstretched glove of the recovering Kozma, on the second base side.

The Triple Kiss was significantly faster than the human eye … even the highly trained eyes of a ballplayer, or an umpire. It affords us the opportunity to discuss the intense amount of new information that slow motion yields.

Slow motion was originally known – in analog filmmaking – as overcranking, a method by which the speed of the film was altered through handcranking the frames. Overcranking was first used in sports as long ago as the 1930’s in the coverage of boxing matches.

It took a long time for overcranking to become slow motion and in that time we got pretty used to it. We allowed slow motion to creep into our observation of games with such ease and normality that the NFL, NBA and MLB now all stop play to incorporate it as a tool in evaluating what has actually taken place.

But yesterday, after a fascinating conversation with an NCAA referee in another sport, David Ma, I began to wonder whether there’s a measurable visual side effect of using high definition slow motion when trying to call a game.

A paranoid part of me also began to wonder whether we’ve already begun what sci-fi feared: letting machines that are ‘more than us’ run our most human aspects.

David Ma believes we should alter the rules of instant replay review so that any referee or umpire using video replay should NOT be allowed to use the slow motion effect in the review.

Ma says, “I have no problem with the use of multiple camera angles for the review, but video review referees should not be allowed to use slow-motion.”

Ma believes there is a significant effect on the field when calling games with video review that includes slow motion, which he refers to as akin to “refereeing under a microscope.”

He points out that no human being could possibly see some of the things that slow motion reveals. In fact, Ma believes referees are already changing the way they call a game because of the presence of the super-slow-motion of HD:

“In pro football now there’s mandatory booth review on any score and in the final two minutes … if you’re a ref and you know that, why would you make a call? The camera can see everything you can’t so you’re most likely going to be wrong!”

Ma speaks with the authority of knowing what it’s like to have to make a call with a super-slow-mo eyeball looking over your shoulder: “With HD slow motion, by far, most of the time the referee’s call is going to be wrong.”

It opens up a discussion about what our perception of real-time is. For example would an umpiring or refereeing crew allowed only to watch the replays in real-time be more effective within the state of play? Ma believes assuredly yes.

This process by which we have accepted the super-slow-mo eyeball as the authority has taken place without significant consideration of the side effect – a human response to the presence of a machine that can see things we can’t.

But perhaps more significantly, the use of slow-mo in sports coverage points out that despite the presence of a tremendous amount of data being added to the information of the events of real-time by slow motion, it’s an effect we’ve subconsciously accepted without critique as a part of our capacity to watch something that has happened.

To David Ma, we’ve stepped onto an escalator which will take us to the point where it will be impossible for a human being to call a game.

I argued that perhaps the refereeing crew could judge the play on the basis of human terms: take in all the data, including the super-slow-mo stuff, and then the video review ref might say: ‘Well, sure we can see that under scrutiny, but there’s no way we could have seen that in real-time’ – thus overriding the machine.

But David Ma reminded me who pays the bills:

“The broadcast media, which is putting out incredibly detailed HD video in super slow-mo will grab that ref by the collar and say, you’re calling it like the nation just saw it, now.”

It rang true. But not one to make an issue of the problem without offering a solution, Ma says the only smart fix is to take slow-mo away from the refs. Alter our use of video replay to remove slow motion.

It’s a bold idea designed to keep the real-time on the field … well, real.

But there would emerge the huge issue that we, the fans, would have the access to all this information that the super-slow motion yields and would be stuck with an unresolvable dispute against the call made by humans trapped in a real-time consideration of events at hand.

The best example – when such frustration peaked – is the now infamous “intertouchdownception” that gave the Seattle Seahawks a victory in the waning seconds over the Green Bay Packers by virtue of a Hail Mary pass that was impossible to call with the human eye and replacement refs and the current NFL rules and the tacit agreement that management isn’t calling interference on Hail Mary’s (lol).

One of the refs on the field who signaled touchdown still believes he made an acceptable call as per one reading of the rule book. Fans remain unconvinced.

If, as Dave Ma suggests, we were to remove slow-motion from the toolbox for referees, could we as fans accept the difference of our view being an enhanced view from that of the refs?

Would we hound the refs for their inability to see what only a machine can see?

Or could we embrace the idea that we are keeping machines out of what is a fundamentally human exercise – sport.

In games like tennis and cricket, slow motion is used to define where or when a fast-moving object or person is at a given moment: the ball on or outside the line, the bat past the line before the ball strikes the wickets and so on.

The absolute exclusion of the slow motion effect would be a pointless exercise. However, it may be that the exclusion of slow motion from video review in certain situations would help keep the game real.

Public art to commemorate “Bloody Thursday” at the corner of Mission and Steuart Streets in San Francisco. The four-day general strike in SF in the summer of 1934 led to unionization of all the West Coast ports of the United States:

37° 47.602′ N, 122° 23.593′ W

Painted in 1985 by an artist’s collective, this mural-sculpture was placed by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union near the previous memorial, this plaque:

When the Hotel Vitale was built in 2004, the sculpture and plaque were moved a short distance and re-erected, with the plaque now mounted on the wall of the hotel. (Source)

The strike began on May 9, 1934 as longshoremen in every West Coast port walked out; sailors joined them several days later. The employers recruited strikebreakers, housing them on moored ships or in walled compounds and bringing them to and from work under police protection.

Strikers attacked the stockade housing strikebreakers in San Pedro on May 15; two strikers were shot and killed by the employers’ private guards. Similar battles broke out in San Francisco and Oakland, California, Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. Strikers also succeeded in slowing down or stopping the movement of goods by rail out of the ports.

The Roosevelt administration tried again to broker a deal to end the strike, but the membership twice rejected the agreements their leadership brought to them. The employers then decided to make a show of force to reopen the port in San Francisco.

On Tuesday, July 3, fights broke out along the Embarcadero in San Francisco between police and strikers while a handful of trucks driven by young businessmen made it through the picket line.

After a quiet Fourth of July the employers’ organization, the Industrial Association, tried to open the port even further on Thursday, July 5.

As spectators watched from Rincon Hill, the police shot tear gas canisters into the crowd, then followed with a charge by mounted police. Picketers threw the canisters and rocks back at the police, who charged again, sending the picketers into retreat after a third assault. Each side then refortified and took stock.

The events took a violent turn that afternoon, as hostilities resumed outside of the ILA the kitchen. Eyewitness accounts differ on the exact events that transpired next. Some witnesses saw a group of strikers first surround a police car and attempt to tip it over, prompting the police to fire shotguns in the air, and then revolvers at the crowd.

One of the policemen then fired a shotgun into the crowd, striking three men in intersection of Steuart and Mission streets. One of the men, Howard Sperry, a striking longshoreman, later died of his wounds. Another man, Charles Olsen, was also shot but later recovered from his wounds. A third man, Nick Bordoise—an out of work cook who had been volunteering at the ILA strike kitchen—was shot but managed to make his way around the corner onto Spear Street, where he was found several hours later. Like Sperry, he died at the hospital.

Strikers immediately cordoned off the area where the two picketers had been shot, laying flowers and wreaths around it. Police arrived to remove the flowers and drive off the picketers minutes later. Once the police left, the strikers returned, replaced the flowers and stood guard over the spot. Though Sperry and Bordoise had been shot several blocks apart, this spot became synonymous with the memory of the two slain men and “Bloody Thursday.”

As strikers carried wounded picketers into the ILA union hall police fired on the hall and lobbed tear gas canisters at nearby hotels. At this point someone reportedly called the union hall to ask “Are you willing to arbitrate now?” (Source for text: wikipedia)

The last voyage of the Space Shuttle Endeavor to the San Francisco Bay Area, brought a whole lot of people out to see it pass overhead. Just as we were setting up to record at the Marin Headlands, the craft suddenly flew into view over my shoulder!

This is in 1080HD so make sure and set it to that on the player. Thanks to J. Oppenheim for driving and camerawork.

( a one hour talk delivered to students at Academy of Art University in San Francisco on Friday, March 1, 2012. There was no recording. Slides appear in order here as images, and some video clips and links have been added to this online version).

Good afternoon, I am M.T. Karthik.

I’ve organized this talk chronologically, and into three general parts, starting first with historical examples of mass media used for sociopolitical language here in the US;

then second, a line between politics of the past and the present drawn by the invention and use specifically of television,

and finally politics in the Digital Age, which will conclude with some discussion of the contemporary situation.

The largest arc of this one hour talk is pluralism of mass media in sociopolitical language – from pamphlet to newspaper to radio to television to cable television to the Internet to FB to Twitter over the last 236 years.

In the last part of the talk, I will also be sharing some of my original work in the field. I have sought to report upon, document and portray through art, certain social interests primarily because I believe they are being written out of history, even covered-up by specific interests and aggregation of public opinion around a monocultural viewpoint of our nation’s political past.

No discussion of American political thought and expression can start without the Declaration of Independence –

– Thomas Jefferson’s seminal document authored against the monarchy in England, which set off an age of revolution on behalf of individuals against kings and nation-states and which, with the U.S. Constitution, created the bond between the Colonies that holds as Federalism to this day.

It’s important to read the Declaration in context, because of the scale of Jefferson and the Colonists’ reach.

Jefferson was influenced by the French and other European thinkers as a result of visits there, but really, the scale of the task was unprecedented.

How would you author a letter to all the Kings and governments of the nations of the world declaring the creation of your own new country – led collectively – with an unprecedented democratic governmental structure set up by its citizens?

It’s said Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas, has supported secession of Texas from the United States. How would his Declaration of Independence read, today? Would he address it to the UN, the Senate, the President, the Supreme Court? – none of these institutions existed for Jefferson to appeal to. He was writing to the nebulous notion of a “world at large” and against the British Monarchy.

What kind of persuasive language do you use in such a context?

“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Epic.

But how was it possible for Thomas Jefferson to set down these words in Virginia with such confidence? The seeds had been sown by a Philadelphian, who wrote and published a pamphlet which became an instant best-seller here and abroad.

Perhaps more than any text in that nascent revolutionary period, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense – addressed audaciously to “the inhabitants of America” – pushed the colonists toward independence. The text demanded an immediate declaration of separation from England a full year before Jefferson sat down to write the great document.

With Common Sense, began the era of the political pamphlet in the United States. The authors of the Revolution used the format in the next ten years to author the Constitution. Should we refer to the American political pamphlet as a medium?

Here’s a recent one:

The pamphlet brings with it the creation of whole industries: printing, typography, stenography, journalism, cartooning, and begins an arc of American sociopolitical language that pluralizes to include newspapers, magazines, radio, television, cable television and the Internet. This talk will discuss the use of all of these and pluralism of media over the 236 years since the Declaration of Independence was written.

The serial publication of essays, viewpoints and even texts of speeches became the normative method for political discourse in the Colonies. It birthed the centralization of thought in new-born cities and the media channel of our oldest newspapers and journals.

The Federalist Papers were a series of 85 articles or essays promoting the ratification of the United States Constitution.

77 of these were published serially in The Independent Journal and The New York Packet between October 1787 and August 1788. A compilation of the 77 and eight others were published as The Federalist or The New Constitution in two volumes in 1788.

From these documents and the discussions they generated, came our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Promptly thereafter, colonial cities birthed the “two-paper town” as the newly minted First Amendment of the Constitution produced contrasting viewpoints in the form of newspapers, which bore, defined and built the “constitution” of American political thought for a hundred and fifty years.
The era made editors-in-chief men of great power a hundred years before Citizen Kane.

Note that the Presidents of the US at this time are mostly forgettable bureaucrats. Perhaps Van Buren stands out for his hemispheric reach, but great debate and intellectual work wasn’t being done by the President. It was occurring in the Senate, at the level of the Supreme Court and with the birth of newspapers’ Editors-in-Chief like Horace Greeley of The New York Tribune – who began to take on greater responsibility for political language.

During the period of 1840 – 1860, after years of the establishment of new civic centers and States, with their own newspapers and journals, the country faced its greatest sociopolitical unrest. Correspondingly, an era of great newspaper publishers and editors representing contrasting viewpoints emerged.

By 1858 it was common for newspaper-editors to employ stenographers to attend speeches and to publish the speeches in totem in their papers.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for Senate in Illinois and the incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate. At the time, US Senators were elected by state legislatures so Lincoln and Douglas were vying for control of the Illinois legislature.

The main issue in all seven debates was slavery and ultimately all of the issues Lincoln would face in the aftermath of his victory in the 1860 Presidential Election – issues which would lead directly to the first dissolution of the Union and the first Civil War in U.S. History.

The debates were held in seven towns in Illinois, but became so popular that they were distributed by papers elsewhere.

But editors of papers who favored Douglas would take the stenographers’ notes and clean them up, fixing errors of notation, context or even meaning only in Douglas’ words. Papers that favored Lincoln did the opposite. The power of the Editor was never before so clearly visible.

Lincoln lost the Senate election, but afterward he had all the texts cleaned, edited properly and republished as a single book – which was read broadly and helped lead him to the nomination in 1860.

The issue of Slavery was defined for vernacular discourse by the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, a remarkable moment in U.S. political history and language. Here’s the Centennial Stamp:

And so for long years newspaper men and politicians were bound in this country and great cultural and social consciousness that helped define the nation emerged through muckraking and whistle-blowing, but also, inevitably, corruption and yellow journalism.

The Spanish-American War may have been born from such yellow journalism, as the sinking of The Maine, falsely attributed to the enemy by papers in the U.S., pushed Americans into the war. More examples exist, and indeed as media pluralizes over the next century, this cozy corruption between politicians and journalists has been exacerbated by new media.

By the turn of the 20th century, the dominant medium was the printed word, and then, the word as heard through radio and both were being used to push political interests and social agendas.

News and official information delivered by voice over the airwaves is warm and available, lucid by the intimation of the sound of the voice, not subject to interpretation of the reader. Baseball and music and DJ’s sounded great on the radio and political communicators quickly recognized it.

Writing for broadcast began.

An excellent metaphoric example of the power of radio before television as a vernacular medium in politics can be found in the Coen Brothers musical film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?.

Set in the southern state of Mississippi before television, one narrative thread of the film follows a Governor’s race. Throughout the film, various people in the State are shown at home following the Election by listening to the radio.

Three escaped state prisoners form a musical group on the run, and anonymously record a single at a rural radio station which becomes immensely popular throughout the state through the power of radio. The men appear in disguise to perform their song live at an event which both candidates are attending.

The Governor’s opponent is insensitive to the popularity of the group, focusing instead on denigrating the men for both their fugitive status and their race. In a moment that predates television’s power in this regard, the challenger is revealed to be a racist statewide over the air. The challenger, unlike the incumbent, has no grasp of the power of the radio.

In the climactic scene, the incumbent Governor of Mississippi, seeing the immense popularity of the three escaped state prisoners, pardons the musical phenomenon the ex-convicts have become. The whole of the dialogue is shown to be carried out on radio throughout the State to the folks listening at home, who even hear the challenger run out of the hall on a rail as the Governor leads the crowd in a rousing chorus of “You Are My Sunshine.”

The entire scene is here:

[with respect to the Coen Brothers]

These scenes are remarkably faithful to the truth. In Louisiana, Jimmie Davis, a popular singer and the attributed author of the song, “You Are My Sunshine, became Governor.

“I remember my granddaddy saying that if Jimmy Davis would come around and sing “You Are My Sunshine”, (he wrote it you know), that everybody in the state would vote for him and never even ask him about a policy, a road, a bridge, nothing. We just really like that song down here, I guess.”

This talk, Political Media, Messages and More, is a follow-up to a talk I gave as News Director and Elections Coverage Producer for KPFK 90.7fm in LA, seven years ago at C-Level Gallery in L.A.’s Chinatown, which was subtitled, Pluralism of Media in the Age of Surveillance [mtk 2005].

Pluralism of media is evident at the addition of each new mass medium – radio doesn’t arrive at the newspaper’s exclusion or the pamphlet’s exclusion.

The pamphlet and certain newspapers remain significant modes of sociopolitical communication. They are at the heart of some, arguably all, of the United States’ greatest movements. Women’s Suffrage,

Socialism, the Labor movement’s successes in the first half of the 20th century.

So Pluralism of Media means we media-include, not media-exclude.

Where before you read pamphlets, now you read pamphlets and newspapers. Where before you read print, now you read print and listen to the radio – you add TV.

We add each medium and the media morph to fit our desires of them. Talk radio, drive-time radio, live radio, each is its own form.

This is what Marshall McCluhan meant when he said any new medium contains all previous media in it.

This is all changing now, of course, as Pluralism of Media has matured since 2005 to become the fluid, the cloud, the totality of data that we swim in today, post-TiVo, at the dawn of the streaming era of the web.

END PART ONE

Part Two: THE TELEVISION PRESIDENCY 1945 – 2008

The Television Presidency, born when Truman used it to announce the end of World War II , instantly made the Office of the President of the United States different from every presidency before TV – and television dominated until the Internet and the digital age, a period of twelve presidents.

Ike was the first President on the tube, and in his most important moment on TV, his exit speech, President General Eisenhower famously warned against the growing presence of a “Military-Industrial Complex”

… perhaps it would have worked in color.

But forever the line that defines the Television Presidency will be the Kennedy-Nixon Debates of 1960.If you’ve seen Frost/Nixon you know that Nixon to the end of his days considered television, and the close-up, his undoing.

In the televised debates with Kennedy, Nixon’s problems with perspiration accumulating on his lip and his jitteriness in general on TV, came over as nervous and untrustworthy – on radio or via text this would never have been transmitted to the public-at-large. Nixon was ridiculed mercilessly for it by critics.

Kennedy garnered the potency of the new medium, and, thanks in part to the work of Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Baines Johnson in delivering Texas, won the election by a slim margin.

I really like the blogger J. Fred McDonald’s take on this, who states, in his excellent essay on Kennedy’s relationship with TV: “For JFK, television could turn defeat into victory.”

Kennedy addressed the people of the country often and personably, but politically used the tool at critical junctures to save himself: after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s use of television was pitch-perfect.

So, the relationship between live color television and the Presidency began with Kennedy’s handsomeness but then, typically of all things new, was taken promptly after discovery to the other extreme, the visual abuse of his savage assassination.

TV then exposed LBJ and Nixon and Kissinger’s dirty wars and the ugly side of the USA: repression, corruption, racism.

The 1968 Olympics were the first televised live and in-color around the world. They took place at the end of one of the most tumultuous years in history, a year I refer to as The People’s Year. This image of a staged protest against race and class oppression, thanks to live television, was impossible to stop:

I participated in making a monument to this moment on the campus of San Jose State University, when in 2006, I worked intimately with others assisting the artist Rigo 23 in the creation of this:

(At this point in the talk, I describe the Tommie Smith/John Carlos statue project anecdotally and include personal, non-published images of the construction of the statues.)

The impact of the moment as seen on television is described well by this Mormon blogger, who tells of being young and white and American and watching with her father. She describes his reaction both at the time and after watching ceremonies of the courageous act on video 20 years later – his change of heart is set in universal terms.

TV was the king of the failure that was The Vietnam War. It ended the Nixon Presidency. But politicians, as they had in the past, reacted by learning to manipulate the new medium to their advantage. Predictably, it was an actor who synthesized the power of the “small screen” for political propaganda.

Ronald Reagan overcame the tool’s power to reveal – with charisma. TV’s investigative potency withered with the mic in his hands.

TV buoyed Reagan into the White House with a full eight-year script, designed just like a Hollywood movie, with a brilliant new dawn at the front and a cowboy riding into the sunset at the end.

Reagan and TV media convinced most Americans that people in Russia lived in a dreary, black-and-white reality, trudging when they walked, standing in interminable lines as black-booted officers of the Kremlin marched past with truncheons to beat them if they acted out.

Reagan asserted our freedom to shop and drive and declare vast spaces ours to tame. Trained and experienced for fifty years in delivering lines written by others, he powered through TV.

Consumer technology was represented in its farthest reach by television, broadcast into millions of homes then on four channels, perhaps a fifth. It was a medium dominated by the Networks, and owned by private corporations. The unholy alliances between corrupt newspaper men and politicians had become de rigeur for relationships with corrupt television execs.

TV was manipulated on the greatest scale by Reagan. In those days, to be broadcast all over the world on US television was as close to “global communication in real-time” as existed and, on the evening of my sixteenth birthday, the actor-president went on television and gravely told us it was imperative to invest our tax dollars in a Strategic Defense Initiative to protect us from nuclear war. Reagan described this SDI as “Star Wars” technology, in the vernacular of the pop-movie phenomenon.

Every legitimate scientist in the world knew SDI was a ploy of language, a technical and political impossibility to deliver, and indeed, it was later revealed that Reagan’s own speechwriters had advised against his including it in public presentation – he’d made the decision on his own that day to do it. Generals, scientists, politicians and writers protested; others were put on the spot, but somehow the language was never exposed.

A naïve public wowed by Reagan, Star Wars, computers and technology in general – and without the Internet to look up the reaction of scientists and writers – ate it up.

Conservatives have used the phrase to justify defense spending for offensive weapons for decades – even now in Europe. Years later we live with these TV-generated myths, like the “dirty bomb”. (cf. The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis)

It was 1984, and the United States was described by most as being a free society, totally unlike the one in George Orwell’s prophetic novel named for that year.

That image – of totalitarian fascism that produced false-flags and enslaved citizens to a national narrative – was projected by the U.S. President onto the Soviet Union, a country he called “The Evil Empire”. It was a term taken directly from popular movies and, wielded by a movie actor through the ubiquity of the medium of television, it became successful political propaganda.

Reagan used his charisma on the small screen to push corporate, private, and even illegal agendas, until the veneer finally broke in the Iran/Contra hearings. But even then, his “I can’t remembers,” delivered pitch-perfect on national television, got him off the hook.

The Dawn of “Pluralism of Mass Media”

By my senior year of high school in 1985, say 10% of students were writing papers with word processors and printing them dot-matrix to take to our teachers. The movement started with stand-alone word processor devices, which were typewriter-like machines that had single-line or paragraph-wide monitors at the top of the keyboard, allowing writers the ability to read what they were typing without printing it first, for the first time ever.

Looking back it seems both obvious and amazing how quickly we made the transition to using the word processor and eventually software on a pc to write. It was a natural step that changed writing forever. Cursive and the typewriter are all but dead. Content began its high-speed ascent. USA Today and CNN were born.

But though the computer was on the verge of changing writing, publishing, and expressing with text and image forever, the single most dominant force of mass media technology wasn’t yet the computer. It was still television, which had expanded through digital technology that created cables delivering far more visual information directly into American homes.

George Herbert Walker Bush, the former head of the CIA, wasn’t close in the primaries when he ran for President in 1980, but was appointed to the bottom half of Reagan’s ticket and became Vice President. Now the actor was termed out.

The Republican Party seized the lessons of the small screen, and having had eight years of method training by a great actor, extended that training to a former serviceman. George H. W. Bush’s team was precise and almost militaristic at staying on message.

Bush repeated phrases without giving policy details, promised Americans more of what Reagan gave them and then repeated the same two or three positive phrases again.

Democratic Presidential Candidate Michael Dukakis’ imagery was by contrast horribly clunky – footage of him in a tank with an ill-fitting helmet had the opposite effect of projecting the desired image of a strong leader.

Bush had the immense advantage of the Office of the Vice President for air-time, but used it sparingly, with few details. When Bush’s campaign did use TV ads, it was to attack – the Willie Horton ad ran ad nauseum and painted Dukakis as a bad judge of character.

This was the beginning of catchphrase culture.

A culture manifest most strongly on television by ads, and in political communication as satire of the timeliest manner on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, featuring Dana Carvey as a repetitive robotic message man George H.W. Bush against John Lovitz as an exasperated Michael Dukakis, who finally shrugs, and delivers the punchline:

[click that link above to see the bit … Chevy Chase birthed portraying the President on SNL, but Dana Carvey nailed it before Phil Hartman or Will Ferrell]

Though we have been pluralizing mass media from the pamphlet to the television, this era is the dawn of the Pluralism of Mass Media that delivers us to the Internet Era of sociopolitical propaganda – not only because of the birth of word processing and cable television, but because radio returns for what it’s good at.

RADIO and TV in concert

Radio broadcasting shifted from AM to FM in the late 1970s because of the opportunity to broadcast music in stereo with better fidelity.

Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show was first nationally syndicated in August 1988, in a later stage of AM’s decline. “Limbaugh’s popularity paved the way for other conservative talk radio programming to become commonplace on the AM radio,” states his Wikipedia entry.

Radio became the drumbeat for the President’s made-for-TV messages. The cool medium was used sparingly for headings and rubrics and catchphrases, while radio was used for tribal intercommunication of long, warm discussion of the message.

Limbaugh had an immense following and Bush made sure he got as much access as he needed. My father remembers seeing footage on network news of President George H.W. Bush welcoming Rush Limbaugh, shaking his hand and then picking up his bag for him before turning to walk into a personal meeting.

This potent image deliverable only by television (wordless communication in background footage, not a press conference with the President) was transmitted for the conservative President and his media agent on ABC, NBC, CBS, and perhaps PBS and the TV message – short, cool, specific – conjoined with the radio message, long, rangy, warm – to create a uniform statement.

The 1988 Election was the last Network News Election. The four-channel era of television was over.

Cable News Network, CNN, began and had its watershed moment by being the first embedded network live during wartime. At last, TV had provided war,itself, live and in-color.

George H.W. Bush and his Gulf War versus Saddam Hussein over Kuwait gave CNN more than a billion viewers worldwide, birthed CNN International and pushed Cable News past Network News in terms of relevance.

Television production became tighter, faster, snappier, with jump-cuts and camera motion. Technology was on the cusp of the fluidity of digital. The TV talk show incorporated radio stylings.

The cable news era, which is only just winding down, began with The Gulf War, and the 1990’s are littered with what cable TV invented: Newstainment, and, critically because it signals the demise of the Academy, the creation of star faculty and pundits.

These define cable TV in the 90’s, composing formats used today by Rachel Maddow, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and so many more pseudo-intellectual, corporate-financed, opinion-making cable TV “shows,” designed by marketing and legal teams, by groovy execs and demographers more than journalists.

Whole channels have emerged – and here the Daily Show/Colbert are uniquely successful – from what was drawn so poorly in the 1990’s. The medium’s highly refined message delivery system operates full-tilt, 24/7, and millions call it real-time.

[END PART TWO]

PART THREE:

The21st Century : The Internet Meets the Television Presidency

Part Three notes are much less formal as the latter part of the talk is filled with anecdotal descriptions of several projects I have engaged in. However, I am writing it up cohesively and will add it here when finished.

This section starts with the 2000 Election that ended in the Florida Fiasco and into Howard Dean’s successes with the Internet, then moves through the Kerry-Bush Election, the first-ever Congressionally-contested election and then the Obama-McCain election, ending finally with the unique situation of politicians in SF running for Mayor and using Twitter for the first time even as they granted Twitter a huge tax-break to stay in the City. I reference works of my own that parallel these circumstances.

This past November, we were extremely lucky to be at Pigeon Point Lighthouse Hostel on the exact day they took the lens down from the top of the lighthouse for the first time since it was installed in 1872, a hundred and forty years ago.

The Pigeon Point lens is a traditional Fresnel lens, designed in 1823 by French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel for use in lighthouses, and characterized by many thin layers of glass which form a prism, allowing the lens to capture more oblique light from a light source and make lighthouses more visible over much greater distances.

It consists of 1008 separate lenses and prisms, and weighs over 8000 pounds.

You can see the lens stored at ground level in the Fog Signal House at the hostel as they complete repairs on the lighthouse. Read history of the lighthouse here.

18% of Teachers and the tacit support of the Longshoreman’s Union gave backbone to the thousands of regular citizens loosely gathered under the rubric of being the poor or underclasses and against corporate policy that directly lowers quality of life in Oakland.

Protesters against Police Brutality were another specific and large group who joined the largely peaceful protest and rally that closed not only the Port of Oakland, but dozens of local businesses that shut in solidarity with the workers.

Largely peaceful and utterly inspiring for a workday in Oakland, the Rally was beautiful and lasted more than 24 hours – since the last of the protesters didn’t leave the Port until late this morning.

At 1pm, Kids marched as a group carrying a banner and chanting on behalf of their teachers. People gathered, spoke, shared protest, supported the Occupy Movement and organized together on a sunny, breezy Wednesday.

In the evening the protesters marched to and successfully closed the 5th largest Port in the country – and workers at the Port showed solidarity. The Port was closed all night.

After midnight, the Movement closed off Broadway between 14th and 16th streets and occupied a vacant building – which organizers say formerly held a non-profit that housed itinerant visitors – and a bonfire was made in the middle of the street, graffiti painted on the largely unused walls, and general chanting against the corporate rape of the middle class.

The Oakland Police arbitrarily decided they had had enough and that the flames from the bonfire – which was in the middle of the pavement in the middle of the road – was a threat to neighboring businesses. They demanded the protesters disband. The protesters refused.

Tear gas and explosive “non-lethals” were used and several protesters were arrested.

The Oakland Police and Mayor Quan continue to exercise the use of tear gas and brutal tactics in “rounding-up” and arresting protesters. There is no clear standard of behavior that constitutes policy – only a vague feeling of the authority wanting to decide when bedtime is – isn’t that called a curfew?

No more than five businesses suffered broken windows and three of these were banks – stated targets. The others, a grocery story (Whole Foods) and Tully’s franchise Coffeeshop were tagged as well.

A rumor spread quickly (and made RT) that Whole Foods threatened its employees with action if they elected to participate in the Strike. The rumor remains unsubstantiated, but the single word”STRIKE” was painted on the front of the store early in the day and two windows were broken.

There was considerably more graffiti in the area at sunrise than there had been at sunset the night before.

In the morning the Port remained closed briefly as protesters held for a time before being coerced into removing themselves for the sake of workers returning for their shifts.

This negotiation between the Occupy Movement and the authority in any city – Oakland, LA, NYC, Tulsa, Seattle – is being conducted on Federal standards by the protesters and State or even City standards by the police.

How can this be? The First Amendment is unequivocal. Occupy Oakland should be able to charge Jean Quan and the police in Federal court for abuse. But can they?

No, because the numbers – while considerable – weren’t anywhere near big enough. Now that’s arbitrary application of the rule of law.

This was no General Strike … but it was a rally of the kind we’ve seen for the past decade labeled as a General Strike to great success within the media and civic sectors. There was an overwhelming feeling of agreement with the consensus expressions given by organizers when calling for the strike.

18% of Teachers and the tacit support of the Longshoreman’s Union gave backbone to the thousands of regular citizens loosely gathered under the rubric of being the poor or underclasses and against corporate policy that directly lowers quality of life in Oakland.

Protesters against Police Brutality were another specific and large group who joined the largely peaceful protest and rally that closed not only the Port of Oakland, but dozens of local businesses that shut in solidarity with the workers.

Largely peaceful and utterly inspiring for a workday in Oakland, the Rally was beautiful and lasted more than 24 hours – since the last of the protesters didn’t leave the Port until late this morning.

At 1pm, Kids marched as a group carrying a banner and chanting on behalf of their teachers. People gathered, spoke, shared protest, supported the Occupy Movement and organized together on a sunny, breezy Wednesday.

In the evening the protesters marched to and successfully closed the 5th largest Port in the country – and workers at the Port showed solidarity. The Port was closed all night.

After midnight, the Movement closed off Broadway between 14th and 16th streets and occupied a vacant building – which organizers say formerly held a non-profit that housed itinerant visitors – and a bonfire was made in the middle of the street, graffiti painted on the largely unused walls, and general chanting against the corporate rape of the middle class.

The Oakland Police arbitrarily decided they had had enough and that the flames from the bonfire – which was in the middle of the pavement in the middle of the road – was a threat to neighboring businesses. They demanded the protesters disband. The protesters refused.

Tear gas and explosive “non-lethals” were used and several protesters were arrested.

The Oakland Police and Mayor Quan continue to exercise the use of tear gas and brutal tactics in “rounding-up” and arresting protesters. There is no clear standard of behavior that constitutes policy – only a vague feeling of the authority wanting to decide when bedtime is – isn’t that called a curfew?

No more than five businesses suffered broken windows and three of these were banks – stated targets. The others, a grocery story (Whole Foods) and Tully’s franchise Coffeeshop were tagged as well.

A rumor spread quickly (and made RT) that Whole Foods threatened its employees with action if they elected to participate in the Strike. The rumor remains unsubstantiated, but the single word”STRIKE” was painted on the front of the store early in the day and two windows were broken.

There was considerably more graffiti in the area at sunrise than there had been at sunset the night before.

In the morning the Port remained closed briefly as protesters held for a time before being coerced into removing themselves for the sake of workers returning for their shifts.

This negotiation between the Occupy Movement and the authority in any city – Oakland, LA, NYC, Tulsa, Seattle – is being conducted on Federal standards by the protesters and State or even City standards by the police.

How can this be? The First Amendment is unequivocal. Occupy Oakland should be able to charge Jean Quan and the police in Federal court for abuse. But can they?

No, because the numbers – while considerable – weren’t anywhere near big enough. Now that’s arbitrary application of the rule of law.

This was no General Strike … but it was a rally of the kind we’ve seen for the past decade labeled as a General Strike to great success within the media and civic sectors. There was an overwhelming feeling of agreement with the consensus expressions given by organizers when calling for the strike.

The Attacks on Mumbai, India
[posted by mtk, 2230 IndianStandardTime, Saturday, November 29th]

Late Wednesday night, in Mumbai’s priciest district, on the city’s south coast shoreline, two-member teams of gunmen suddenly appeared, fanned out and fired AK-47 rounds randomly into crowds while hurling grenades out of their backpacks.

They targeted luxury hotel restaurants and eventually seized hostages and whole floors of two major hotels and a Jewish Center, from which they launched a firestorm of bullets and incendiary devices aimed at Mumbaikars, tourists, police, anti-terror forces, and the colonial-era hotels themselves.

Gunfire began at or near the Oberoi Hotel at Nariman Point around 9:30pm, and by 11:30 the coastal Marine Drive was a war zone of ambulances, police vehicles, satellite TV vans and trucks filled with heavily armed soldiers. Soldiers moved into the Oberoi even as seven grenade explosions rocked the Taj Mahal, which burned for hours. Simultaneous grenade and gunfire attacks by armed gunmen began at the central railway station, a taxi stand and a hospital. Fierce battles between police and terrorists lasted more than 50 hours and have been described as urban warfare.

Two full days later, the death toll stands at nearly 200, including 22 foreigners, three high-ranking Indian anti-terror police, and at least nine of the terrorists. One has been captured, nine others detained and the nation of India stands shocked to attention.

The attacks themselves relied on multiple, audacious gunmen and were conducted with organized and well-trained execution, implying greater terrorist infrastructure, but most serious experts doubt the involvement of al Qaeda.

At the Trident Oberoi and Taj Mahal luxury hotels, the “terrorists” sought and killed foreigners. American and British guests were targeted in particular, but among the dead are a Greek millionaire, a Japanese tourist and at least two Australians. The attacks were brash, loud, pointed and violent. Many are still wondering who would do such a thing and why?

On Thursday morning, speaking from inside the Oberoi, where foreigners were held hostage, a man identified as Sahadullah told India TV he belonged to an Indian Islamist group seeking to end the persecution of Indian Muslims: “We want all mujahideens held in India released and only after that we will release the people.”

This claim and a written fax #stating responsibility was with a group called “Deccan Mujahadeen” – a regional identification with the South Central Deccan Plateau in India – masked the true authors and were meant to inspire “homegrown” terrorists within India.

The attacks are cast thus somewhere between a suicide bombing and a revolutionary assault. But they seem hyper-provocative – an orgy of public violence for an unlikely single objective. There are strong reasons to believe they are provocations with other authors and objectives.

We can describe four:
1. Hindu Extremists
Mumbai has a history of Election year violence and investigations continue into an internal political agency for the attackers. There are accusations against Hindu Nationalists in pursuit of a harder-line policy, concerning Kashmir and Pakistan in specific, and Muslims in general. Extremist Hindus have executed attacks or organized them to create a greater fear of terrorism and push the election toward their policy.

It has been reported that Hemant Karkare, chief of the city’s anti-terrorism squad, who was gunned down Wednesday in the line of duty, was in fact on the trail of Hindu extremists in the cases of certain attacks in previous years. This from Amaresh Misra [tel:91-9250305699]:

“The Mumbai ATS chief Hemant Karkare and other officers of the ATS have been killed. These were the same people who were investigating the Malegaon Blasts–in which Praggya Singh, an army officer and several other noted personalities of the BJP-RSS-Bajrang Dal-VHP were arrested. Karkare was the man to arrest them. Karkare was receiving threats from several quarters. LK Advani, the BJP chief and several other prominent leaders of the so-called Hindu terrorism squad were gunning for his head. And the first casualty in the terrorist attack was Karkare! He is dead–gone. the firing by terrorists began from Nariman House–which is the only building in Mumbai inhabited by Jews. Some Hindu Gujaratis of the Nariman area spoke live on several TV channels–they openly said that the firing by terrorists began from Nariman house. And that for two years suspicious activities were going on in this house. But no one took notice.”

UPDATE: China says don’t rule out Hindu extremists on the basis of “the red thread” around the wrist of attackers – a Hindu practice, that wouldn’t be necessary camo/costumery where they were attacking, a westernized part of town. Read the “Red Thread” China angle here. (Chinese Red Thread, ha! multicultural poetry, I say) The only other named agent in all this then is Dawood Ibrahim (discussed below) who serves as the transition to:

2. Unseen Hands in Pakistan
China, the USA, Russia and Iran all have their hands in “leaderless” Pakistan, since the collapse of Musharraf and the murder of Benazir Bhutto. China has negotiated a port with Pakistan to allow the Chinese access to Caspian Sea oil by pipeline. The United States is actively interested in Indian/USA alliance to balance China. Iran is the source of the China oil, Russia seeks to counterbalance USA’s presence in region. Jane’s has alredy identified a China/Russia/Iran Axis that seeks Pakistan. Countered by a USA(via Iraq/Afghanistan and now)/India alliance – trying to get India into aggression with USA versus Pakistan. All of these hands have interests and remain largely unseen could any of them be involved in these attacks? Are there terrorist or operatives willing to deal with anyone for the highest price? Who are they? Could this be from Pakistan but having no relation to Zardari or ISI?

3. Israel/BJP connection?

There are claims that when the BJP was in power in 2001 (when it allowed Sharon to visit as the first Israeli PM recognized by India) secret alliances were made between Extremist Hindus and Zionist Jews to address Pakistan more aggressively. It has been claimed that as recently as this summer, Israeli Security and Mossad Agents have been involved in training these Indian Extremists. The idea of Mossad involvement here is far-fetched, but possible. Could extremist Zionist and Extremist Hindus be running provocation false flag attacks to incite violence? Again, Misra:

“It is clear that Mossad is involved in the whole affair. An entire city has been attacked by Mossad and probably units of mercenaries. It is not possible for one single organization to plan and execute such a sophisticated operation. It is clear that this operation was backed by communal forces from within the Indian State. … Muslims and secular Hindus have been proven right. RSS type forces and Israel are all involved in … destabilizing … India. India should immediately snap all relations with Israel. We owe this much to Karkare and the brave ATS men who had shown the courage to arrest Praggya Singh, Raj Kumar Purohit, the army officer and several others.”

the radical blogster aangir fan agrees and thinks Dawood Ibrahim (if you don’t know who he is, it’s detailed in clip) is a pawn of both Pakistan’s ISI and USA’s CIA! [BTW, after the NYT blamed them yesterday, the L-e-t have since issued a denial] so Ibrahim serves again as a transition which leads us to:

4. Bush/Cheney Actively Agitating Covertly (cf. Iran)
Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker this year that Bush/Cheney received the go ahead from Nancy Pelosi and seven other Congressmembers – four Democrats and four Republicans – to earmark $400 million dollars for covert actions in Iran. COVERT US military within the sovereign country of Iran! These are resources and personnel allocated to agitation. Bush/Cheney and the neocons’ stated policy is to agitate and push these countries into action in an attempt to get the US military involved to “settle” it as a part of their War on Terror. Are the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad and these attacks on Mumbai covert agitiation black-ops out of USA’s Pentagon?
UPDATE: Professor Michel Chossudovsky of The Centre for Research on Globalization at Univ of Ottawa has an excellent piece on the whole affair! with deep details into U.S./I.S.I. relations. It concludes with this smart rebuke of “what we are seeing now” in the English-language press:

“The role of the US-UK-Israeli counter terrorism and police officials, is essentially to manipulate the results of the Indian police investigation.
It is worth noting, however, that the Delhi government turned down Israel’s request to send a special forces military unit to assist the Indian commandos in freeing Jewish hostages held inside Mumbai’s Chabad Jewish Center (PTI, November 28, 2008).

Bali 2002 versus Mumbai 2008
The Mumbai terrorist attacks bear certain similarities to the 2002 Bali attacks. In both cases, Western tourists were targets. The tourist resort of Kuta on the island of Bali, Indonesia, was the object of two separate attacks, which targeted mainly Australian tourists. (Ibid). The alleged terrorists in the Bali 2002 bombings were executed, following a lengthy trial period, barely a few weeks ago, on November 9, 2008. (Michel Chossudovsky, Miscarriage of Justice: Who was behind the October 2002 Bali bombings? Global Research, November 13, 2009). The political architects of the 2002 Bali attacks were never brought to trial.

A November 2002 report emanating from Indonesia’s top brass, pointed to the involvement of both the head of Indonesian intelligence General A. M. Hendropriyono as well as the CIA. The links of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) to the Indonesian intelligence agency (BIN) were never raised in the official Indonesian government investigation –which was guided behind the scenes by Australian intelligence and the CIA. Moreover, shortly after the bombing, Australian Prime Minister John Howard “admitted that Australian authorities were warned about possible attacks in Bali but chose not to issue a warning.” (Christchurch Press, November 22, 2002).

With regard to the Bali 2002 bombings, the statements of two former presidents of Indonesia were casually dismissed in the trial procedures, both of which pointed to complicity of the Indonesian military and police. In 2002, president Megawati Sukarnoputri, accused the US of involvement in the attacks. In 2005, in an October 2005 interview with Australia’s SBS TV, former president Wahid Abdurrahman stated that the Indonesian military and police played a complicit role in the 2002 Bali bombing. (quoted in Miscarriage of Justice: Who was behind the October 2002 Bali bombings?, op cit)”

All of this must be considered and investigated seriously, and restraint and calmness must be encouraged in India. Let us mourn and heal and investigate.
Indian investigators, from the street level up to the Prime Minister’s office, state that forces responsible for the attacks are “based outside the country” – and the world’s press has rapidly presumed Pakistan. There has as yet been no explicit charge against another nation, but it has been revealed that the one captured terrorist is from Pakistan[and stated he had accomplices in Mumbai] , and a guarded, but confident and firmly-worded statement from the Prime Minister warned “neighbours” of consequences if they continued to allow the use of their territories to terror groups.

77-year old Sonny Rollins absolutely lifted 2,000 plus in a wowing two-hour set Thursday night at Zellerbach Hall on the Berkeley campus.

The gig was the first before a worldwide tour over the next two months for the tenor giant that includes Singapore, Japan, China and Rollins’ first trip to Korea. The group returns to the US briefly before moving on to Europe in the summer.

The irrepressible genius called tunes and blew glowing chord support throughout the show and was positively still energetic backstage – after two hours of uninterrupted performance. The Rollins feel remains, an unmistakably witty and stable voice in jazz and the sextet has found a dope new heartbeat in drummer Kobie Watkins who, churning the toms, created a pulsing drum-and-bass groove that Rollins, and all of us, felt. If they were strolling it would be sick.

Highlight of the evening for me was witnessing novelist Ishmael Reed and Rollins share a fistpound backstage after the show, and hearing the former introduce his wife to Rollins, thus: “Meet my wife, Carol, Carol … The Colossus.”

During the Iraq War and the Election of 2004, I was news director and director of elections coverage for Pacifica Station KPFK, 90.7fm Los Angeles, 98.7fm Santa Barbara, California – the largest independent fm signal in the United States of America.

During the buildup to the war I increased news presence on the schedule by 200%.

For six months after that I increased it 150%.

I broke up Free Speech Radio News into segments and reproduced the evening news with one host rather than two. This allowed us to write more content and update the FSRN content with the latest news [hired PC Burke, managed ML Lopez]

In Los Angeles KPFK had long been a place for actors to volunteer to get air time. I fired the actors who were reading the news and pledged no others would be used – rather I would train a team of multi-disciplinary writers to read.

[I hand-picked JF Rosencrantz, Page Getz, Sister Charlene Mohammed, Aura Bogado, Walt Tanner, and many other voices for the newsroom and trained them to deliver on radio].

I added two reporters [both hires were women] and added music and breaks to make the news more listenable for a younger audience. I produced original art pieces, found-sound and cultural pieces.

I was the first News Director to go to Palestine and Israel via Amman, in late 2003 and to the UN, where I was credentialed for the Security Council during run up to war [early 2003]. I reported daily into the midday and evening news and this work is archived in the Pacifica Radio Archives [MTKintheOPT2003/04].

I was the only reporter at the United Nations Security Council on March 21st, 2003, to ask each Ambassador of the U.N. Security Council whether or not they would condemn the bombing of Baghdad by the United States and U.K. the previous night. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told me and all the press corps beside me in response that Putin spoke for all Russia when he said it “violates the U.N. Charter.”

I was the opening voice on Pacifica’s “Attack on Peace,” a nationwide broadcast to millions of listeners and, with Amy Goodman, co-hosted the first hour of what would be three days of historic nationwide broadcasting about Peace and opposing the War on Iraq as it was taking place.

KPFK and Pacifica gave me a chance to do something epic and we both benefited greatly from it. I stand behind my decision to give my time during the Iraq War and Election 2004 to Pacifica. I am exceptionally proud of the work we did.

A detailed description of our work and how it culminated, follows:

02102003 First Newscast with MTK as News Director
First time we ever cut FSRN into separate news pieces, removed the music and parsed the show across the hour. We only ran FSRN as a complete program three times over the next two years.

0210-02282003 The Immokalee Workers Hunger Strike

03012003 move to a single host for the one-hour KPFK Evening News
First hosted by MTK (02282003) and then briefly by Jennifer Hodges and Trevor David and subsequently Monica Lopez, Patrick C. Burke, Aura Bogado, Saman Assefi, Walt Tanner, Teresa Wierszbianska, Sister Charlene Mohammad and others, the one-host-one-hour newscast using FSRN as spliced features parsed across the hour, radically professionalized KPFK’s Evening News “sound”.

03052003 Student Walk Out
Coverage from high schools and universities throughout signal area.

03102003 The addition of the Morning and Mid-Day Reports
At this point, one month into my tenure I had increased News production by 250%, and was preparing to cover the opening of a U.S. Invasion.

0301-04112003 U.N. Security Council as it deliberated Res. 1441
MTK representing Pacifica and KPFK demanded live from the press pit inside the U.N. Security Council chambers in New York, that each available Secretary of the Security Council respond to the bombing of Baghdad.

0318-03202003 Live coast-to-coast newscast hosted (NY/LA) during opening of US attack on Iraq with live reports from New York, Baghdad, Havana and San Francisco MTK with M. Lopez, T. David, P. Burke, J. Hodges, M. LePique, M. White, N. Thompson, volunteers and the Interns (Clark/Al Sarraf).

04082003 The Guardian of Britain singles out KPFKhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,932223,00.html
“If you live in LA, the Bay Area, New York, Washington or Houston, you can, for respite, tune in to one of the Pacifica network radio stations, which for more than 50 years have been broadcasting news from the left. Their war coverage is entitled “Assault on Peace” rather than “Showdown Iraq” and on an average day on my local station, KPFK, you can hear Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky and members of the anti-war movement with a completely different take on the war and items of news not broadcast anywhere else.”

04102003 Pacifica’s National Dialogue for Peace
MTK opened the first hour of this nationwide radio program, co-hosting with Amy Goodman. “Pacifica’s National Dialogue for Peace,” was a three-hour radio broadcast that allowed calls from unscreened listeners to an electronic-audio panel that included Ohio Democrat and Presidential Candidate Dennis Kucinich live from a payphone at Congress, Global Village Activist Medea Benjamin live from Washington D.C., and Kani Xulan, a displaced Turkish Kurd, live from New York.

04242003 Occidental Petroleum and Airscan Sued by Colombian villager
Original investigative reporting by JFR and MLL and MTK on the lawsuit filed by Alberto Mujica against Occidental Petroleum and Airscan Security for the cluster-bombing of Santo Domingo, Colombia which murdered Mujica’s family and neighbors and destroyed their village on December 13, 1998.

0502003 MTK Hosts One Hour Special News Program Dialogue with Listeners

05052003 Audio Magazine Project element
The sound of birds on Mt. Washington used as an ambient newsbreak

05092003 Argentine Election Coverage with live results

05012003 Bush’s “End of the War/Victory” speech
Margaret Presscod and M.T. Karthik step on GWBush as he speaks from the deck of the U.S.S. Lincoln parked off the coast of San Diego. Analysis included timely news and information about what was happening in Iraq in Falluja in the last weeks of April and clearly points out actual lies by GWB in the speech. Khaled Abou El-Fadl, professor of Law at UCLA weighs in on Bush’s racist and historically regressive language in an incisive and brilliant post-speech analysis.

05152003 Vinnell Corporation
Vinnell – a local firm that built Dodger Stadium – has ties to the Saudi Arabian National Guard and the C.I.A., 19 Immigrants found suffocated to death in the back of a trailer truck in Texas. Both of these stories are important and represent the beginning of a split in the newsroom.

0515-06092003 Three Chechan Female Suicide Bombers in three weeks
Our Chechnya coverage began to get deeper and deeper after this. We worked our way up to the election in October with coverage from at least seven news sources, including sources from the region: Interfax, Pravda, The Moscow Times.

05182003 Argentine Runoff Election that elects Kirchner

05302003 Audio Magazine Project
A bright and exciting newscast with music by Sergio Mielnishenko

06162003 Dominique deVillepin and Strawon defining Hamas as terrorist, live coverage of “People Over Politics” Rally Downtown with PCB
This cast is indicative of things we have been doing: in-depth international news with specific cultural and intellectual analysis (MTK) and coverage of local protests and rallies (PCB, MLL, volunteers). We became quite good at this actually with reporters in the field at many key events often phoning in live.

06182003 Iranian exiles self-immolations in Paris and GMO crops in California
Our GMO coverage pre-dated the media burst in summer and our Iranian self-immolation stories were like nothing done anywhere in English. We looked directly at the suicides as a political tool for communication.

06272003 Coverage of Protests against George W. Bush and Parvez Musharraf, military dictator of Pakistan and ally to Bush War.
Not only did we cover the several thousand anti-Bush and few dozen pro-Bush demonstrators on this night, but we had a credentialed reporter at the visit and lecture by Pakistani Coup Leader Parvez Musharraf (PCB).

07042003 Special News Programming on “4th of July” with editorial comment by MTK and “socio-political interstices” produced by AAB

This is was the only time I recorded an editorial for the KPFK Evening News. I had, by this time produced dozens of them and would go on to produce hundreds more. Just once, on the Fourth of July during the War Year, I allowed myself a luxury that is abused by most Pacifica Radio Hosts.

07112003 Live interview with State Assembly Member Judy Chu
Her bill sponsored to support multilingual contract language in California.
(with brief Mandarin Chinese-language exchange with MTK in the outcue)

0715-08152003 Liberian struggle, Iraq worsens
We began covering Subsaharan Africa and Liberia arose like a healthy distraction from the real issues in DRC and Nigeria and Sierra Leone so we began doing that as well. Live coverage from Nigerian elections led to live calls to Uganda as well.

07152003 New News Theme introduced, headline bumpers added

0720-07292003 Donovan Jackson beating verdict
live reports from Inglewood and the courthouse by volunteer Jordan Davis

07212003 Audio Magazine Project element
the sound of the Dodgers organ player and stadium announcer calling the final field and plate appearances of “Ricky Henderson” versus the St. Louis Cardinals over the weekend

07252003 Napalm Use in Iraq
Detailed analysis of the admission by U.S. military of the use of napalm or incendiary bombs that are illegal on Iraqis. Mark 77 versus Napalm incendiaries in detail.

0801-11172003 Russian Federation and “breakaway republics”
We wrote and delivered original work on Chechnya which led to deeper coverage of Azerbaijan, Kzrygystan and Georgia as well as to coverage of The Russian Federation with original interviews of: Matt Bevins, Editor-in-Chief of the Moscow Times for 9 years. (DP), Ian Bremmer Director of the Eurasia Division of the World Policy Institute(DP/MTK), Professor Ronald Suny of the University of Chicago (DP), Giorgy Lomsadze of the Caspian Business Daily live from Tibilisi when as many as 20,000 Georgians descended on the governmental center. (MTK)

08062003 Launch of “Politics or Pedagogy” an education column
John Cromshow’s weekly spin at radio by, for and about kindergarten to high school teachers, students and administration

0806-08102003 Camisea Gas Project, Peru
Amazon Watch and Friends of the Earth take on Ex-Im Bank who want to finance a project that would jeopardize rainforest. We do in-depth interviews on the Paracas National Marine Reserve, home to the endangered Humboldt Penguin. Ex-Im backs off. (MTK)

0809-10072003 The California Recall Election
Complete coverage of all legal angles of lawsuits preceding the Recall and full coverage of three debates and the election, including post-election analysis and commentary and coverage from The Biltmore Hotel, Schwarzenegger’s HQ and Sacramento. Live radio and interviews with Peter Camejo, Terry McAuliffe, and press relations for Davis, Bustamante, Huffington and McClintock.

0808-08112003 Guantanamo Detainees
Focus on the Guantanamo detainees including interviews with attorney’s and family members

0812-09152003 Sherman Austin
Coverage ending with a piece from the field at the courthouse on the day Austin surrendered to authorities Interviews of tearful friends and family of Sherman Austin by Alan Minsky.

08082003 One Hour Special Program on the Recall
Volunteer Jordan Davis joined MTK to discuss the Recall with listeners

09032003 90-minute special program Recall Debate
MTK hosts coverage of debate between five major candidates and listener calls

09052003 Audio Magazine Project
Cast with music by Sergio Mielnishenko, new computers in the newsroom

09112003 M.T. Karthik’s 9/11 Special
a one hour program on covert U.S. Military operations and 9/11’s throughout history, including 9/11/2001.

0912-09162003 Josh Connole Arrest
Live breaking newsradio had KPFK collecting sound from ReGen Co-op as the arrest was occurring.

and thus ended my first year as News Director of KPFK 90.7fm Los Angeles, for which I was rewarded with doubling listeners and a raise.

2004 News and Election Coverage Executive Producer

I was often accused of editorializing. Having studied journalism for years, I denied it with specific details. I countered that editorializing is rampant on the other side, so lies are being taken for fact. I believe I’ve been vindicated in recent years.

The two-paper town is so rare that journalism and the record no longer exist. Colin Powell could spend an hour and a half at the UN telling the world that Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons of mass destruction, that he is capable of delivering them to people and committing mass atrocity. Powell does this for 96 minutes and every paper presents it as fact.

What you got was a non-competitive view that said, “we think Saddam Hussein is this. We think Saddam Hussein is that.” They didn’t do “We observed Powell pitching such and such about Saddam Hussein.” Now how did we at KPFK? We played not one clip of Powell or Jack Straw – their ideas were already in all the papers. We let people hear other voices that favored and opposed war- the UN ambassadors from Pakistan, the Syrian, the Chilean. Others on the Security Council who you could not hear anywhere else. We provided the competitive journalism that allowed a comparison to what you got in every other paper.

“US American” is an example of something linguistic that I generated with much assistance from Patrick Burke. We’d say “US American” for all references to persons, entities or policies of the USA. The term was meant to replace and correct American. American President Bush, American this, American that. Well, Chile is in America, Canada is in America, Mexico is in America. Listeners got that. It’s an antidote for that broadcast idea of The Global North being the most important. It is also important because it contextualizes the USA, which I believe must be isolated. Only after we had done this on KPFK for two years did the stories ridiculing the beauty pageant entrant who used the term emerge. I defend the young woman here for the first time as possibly the first U.S. American to exist, thus placing me second, Patrick C. Burke, third and anyone else who chooses to identify in line beyond this point. As a journalist, I believe you should be extra-national – you should be outside of the state, like Neruda, like Paz. A journalist should be able to say, “I investigate your decision as a nation,” not reproduce the Pentagon line by printing the fax they just sent as news, which sadly happens now in many newsrooms.

KERRY WON
We had perhaps as many as half a million listeners during the Election Cycle. On November 23, 2004, three weeks after Election Day, I sent out an e-mail from my private e-mail account, which in any case I knew meant my termination.

In that e-mail I projected the winner of the 2004 U.S. Presidential race to be Democrat John Kerry by virtue of a true victory of the votes in Ohio and thus an electoral college delegate count of 270 to 267. I believe I would have been the only broadcast journalist in the United States to have made such a projection in the election month of November 2004 or before the Electoral College first met in early December – but I wasn’t able to make it on the air. It was and remains too radical in mainstream media circles to suggest that John Kerry won – not just on-air, but even in an e-mail. I stand by my projection. I believe the Bush campaign rigged the election of 2004 and negotiated a settlement with Kerry/McAuliffe and the DNC. There can be no other explanation for the mathematics or my personal experiences that night.

Nationwide exit polls for the 2004 Elections in the United States were conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International on contract with major national press and TV news services. One of the unique things that KPFK radio did on Election Night that was different from other live broadcasts was to release results as confirmed only as they were broadcast by one particular television outlet that was a part of this contract. We chose to rely on C-SPAN as the lead media outlet for our broadcasts in announcing results.

This decision was made because it had been reported that the non-profit cable network was the only television outlet that had taken the extra precaution to create a special professional relationship with the Associated Press to allow them access to no less than 500 AP reporters around the country to confirm numbers as they came in on election night. This relationship was established as a reform after the television debacle of the 2000 Election in which Florida “flipped” from red to blue in the middle of the night. As members of the National Election Pool contracting Edison/Mitofsky, these AP reporters and C-SPAN, would have access to both exit polls and election results.

During KPFK’s election night broadcast we occasionally checked numbers being reported by the other networks and announced discrepancies to our listeners as a means of covering the media covering the election while covering the election itself. If a network announced a result before any other network or before C-SPAN, we let our listeners know which network (or network anchor) it was, what the result was and whether or not C-SPAN had confirmed it. I believe we were the only radio station in the U.S. to take this near-academic approach to covering the media while covering the election.

By this methodology, and by being in Los Angeles, in the western-most time zone, KPFK radio broadcast final results of exit polls and confirmed results as they were announced from east coast to west – although listeners to KPFK in L.A. sometimes received projections and actual results later than those posted on NBC, CBS, ABC and FOX, the results were hard, linear, continuous and directly linked to exit polling and to confirmed results as they came in. We told our listeners that we considered matters too close to call. We didn’t rush to judgement.

Edison/Mitofsky conducted exit polls in each state and a nationwide exit poll and, on the afternoon of Election Day, disclosed confidential poll data to the general public showing John Kerry ahead of George Bush in several key battleground states. At 8:27pmPST [11:30pmEST], despite widespread reports of voter disenfranchisement and massive problems with the mechanics of voting, it seemed clear in our broadcast booth that Kerry was winning the race for the presidency by a very slim margin of the electoral college delegate count based on exit poll results and confirmed numbers in states that were not too close to call. Florida polls had just closed for Bush. It had been out of our calculation for projecting a Kerry win, which at any rate we did not broadcast at that time.

It was exactly then that the numbers began to change; between the hours of 8:40 and 10:30 on the west coast. We ended our election night coverage at 10:30, with the position of “Too Close to Call,” but witnessed and reported a radical shift in numbers from 8:40 until the end of our broadcast. If, as has been alleged, there was e-vote cheating going on, I believe this is when it happened.

It is important to note that we were using one television source and not shifting our results in instances when a network announced their confirmed result. We stayed with C-SPAN throughout and as a result I am able to state unequivocally and with conviction that there was a radical change in numbers from confirmed sources with access to both exit polls and results in a very short amount of time at a specific hour on Election Night.

Immediately after the close of polls, at 10pm Eastern, Edwin/Mitofsky’s national exit poll showed Kerry had won the popular vote by a margin of 3%. Less than fifteen hours later, on the morning of November 3, the official vote counts showed Bush defeating Kerry by 2.5% in the popular vote.

This discrepancy between exit polls and the official election results – a five and a half point swing, astronomical in historical terms – has never been statistically resolved. Several methods have been used to estimate the probability that the national exit poll results would be as different as they were from the national popular vote by random chance. These estimates range from 1 in 16.5 million to 1 in 1,240. No matter how it is calculated, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to chance.

In the absence of raw data, analyses were accomplished using “screen captures” of data published to the Internet on election night. One such analysis of unadjusted exit poll data, by Dr. Ron Baiman, a professor of statistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found that statistically significant discrepancies of exit poll results from reported election outcomes were not randomly distributed but rather concentrated in five states, four of which were battleground states, long known to have been key to victory by electoral college vote.

This geographically biased error in exit polls against actual results seems too politically sensitive to be coincidence and indeed, Baiman concluded that the probability that these discrepancies would simultaneously occur in only the most critical states of Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania (rather than in any other randomly selected group of three states), is less than 1 in 330,000, an analysis that agreed with independent calculation by Dr. Steven Freeman, visiting faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, who calculated that the probability that random chance accounted for simultaneous exit poll discrepancies in the three battleground states was well outside of the realm of statistical plausibility.

On January 19, 2005, Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International released a 77-page report entitled “Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004,” acknowledging widespread discrepancies between their exit polls and official counts, admitting the differences were far greater than can be explained by sampling error, but asserting the disparity was “most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters.” The company did not, however, conduct any statistical tests to prove this likelihood of “reluctant Bush voters.” On March 31, a non-profit group called US Count Votes did just that, publishing: An Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies as a part of its National Election Data Archive Project, in which the group addresses what it identifies as the only three possible explanations for the discrepancies: random sampling error, error in the exit polls, or error in the actual results.

Edwin/Mitofsky itself declared in admitting the immense discrepancies, that they could not be due to chance or random sampling error, with which the authors of the US Count Votes agree. But Edwin/Mitofsky takes the view that their own exit polls were incorrect and the official actual results are correct, while US Count Votes states that the consortium does not come any where near substantiating that position in its report noting that actually “the data that Edison/Mitofsky did offer in their report shows how implausible this theory is.”

The US Count Votes Analysis claims convincingly that Edison/Mitofsky “did not even consider” the hypothesis that the actual results could have been wrong, and “thus made no effort to contradict” this hypothesis, stating further that “some of Edison/Mitofsky’s exit poll data may be construed as affirmative evidence for inaccurate election results,” and concluding, “that the hypothesis that the voters’ intent was not accurately recorded or counted cannot be ruled out and needs further investigation.”

Many statisticians including Baiman and Freeman are signatories to the US Count Votes analysis and a summative report can be downloaded free from:

uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/USCountVotes_Re_Mitofsky-Edison.pdf.

The report uses the data released by Edwin/Mitofsky to debunk its own “reluctant Bush responders” explanation and the results of the analysis are both very clear and very disturbing. A comparison of votes cast in the Presidential race with votes on the same ballots in other races or for or against various propositions and referenda around the country, reveals even greater unexplainable biases toward Bush in the official vote count as compared to the exit polls.

My experience as a journalist covering Election 2004 led me to these conjectures. My methodology covering the results on-air live from the west coast on election night and in the three weeks that followed confirmed for me a desperate need for someone in media to announce that they did not believe George W. Bush won the Election and, because of the radical transformation of the U.S. American elections process by the landmark Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore (2000), to announce it loudly before the Electoral College met in early December.

Frustrated by what I saw as a second contravention of democracy during a Presidential election, I hoped to induce investigation of the results by honestly reporting what was strongly suggested by conjecture. The media and John Kerry capitulated. We stayed in context.

That’s why I sent an e-mail from my position as Elections Coordinator for Pacifica Radio projecting John Kerry the President of the United States.

Immediately after sending that e-mail for which I was relieved of duty, I sent another e-mail, this time as a concerned voter, to my Senator:

U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer:
Let me begin by saying I voted for you. And that you may now be the only person that we on the progressive left can approach, because you are in many ways a part of power and the ruling class in the United States and you are a well-respected member of one of the major parties.

We beseech you to ignore Republicans, Democrats and so-called Progressives who have conceded this election as accomplished fairly and to independently look into the matter.

Please, Senator Boxer, take up the call for Investigation of the Election of 2004. Do it now; before the Electoral College votes and before the Inauguration of the President.

At this moment – as in 2000 – colleagues of yours in the House are prepared to contest and investigate the election for fraud. One Senator willing to ask is all they need to achieve such a request. Only one single Senator who is politically safe, who has the support of a Progressive community, and who has the courage of conviction to stand up and say simply that:

decisions regarding how we vote and for whom are being made too quickly, and as a result carelessly, and perhaps erroneously; that our democratic processes are being rushed and hurried by the Republicans led by Karl Rove [called the “architect” of the re-election by Bush] and; that democracy in the U.S.A. is suffering terribly, if not critically.

As a woman and a progressive Democrat, you have won re-election easily. People here support you for your ideas and values. You are in a safe state among people who share your beliefs.

After hearing four weeks of testimony from key states [especially Ohio] and after reading horrifying stories from around the country as to what happened on Tuesday, November 2, I and many of your other constituents believe that the results of the 2004 election are significantly riddled with errors, many of which circumstantially point to the STRONG possibility of FRAUD and vote fixing.

Senator Boxer, changing the outcome of the election is NOT our interest in asking this of you. The desperate and fundamental need for a fair elections process and real democracy DEMANDS a slower, more measured, piece-by-piece investigation – conducted by Congress – of the Election of 2004 and in particular of the votes cast via electronic voting machines.

It is now clear that George W. Bush’s falsely named Help America Vote Act written to address the many issues that resulted from the 2000 election, served only to rush US counties and states into purchasing machines that have become black holes for American votes.

California’s Secretary of State Kevin Shelley was admired by people across the State for standing up to the manufacturers who were clearly complicit in rushing these devices past proper standards and though now he is being attacked within the system by the powers that be, it is clear he has TREMENDOUS public respect for his forward-looking actions on e-voting over the past year and a half. By setting an aggressive calendar for hearings and for public and private input, Secretary of State Shelley was able to decertify machines and to put out a detailed list of 23 conditions for the use of other machines to make them safer and more accurate for Californians. He said when doing this that cheating wasn’t going to happen on his watch. He then testified before the Election Assistance Commission and at both the Democratic and Republican Conventions, that other states should earnestly learn from California’s experience and institutionalize protections … but it was too little, too late.

Other states and indeed Bush’s White House and the GOP-controlled Congress, diminished the significance of Secretary of State Shelley’s very hard work. Senator Boxer, you will be greeted by a flood of support from the grassroots level if you take this on. You could revolutionize the argument.

As our Senator won’t you chastise them for what they did to our Secretary of State? Won’t you stop their stampeding toward re-election for long enough to examine the facts and the data? Won’t you please tell the rest of the country that Californians were very relieved to have had a Secretary of State who cared enough to demand protections against problems suffered in other parts of the country?

Please, Senator Boxer, look deep into the future of this country, summon the courage and do what you do so well. Stand with your colleagues in the House who believe a Congressional Investigation into the Election of 2004 is an absolute necessity before the U.S.A. can pass one more law or engage in one more battle. Only one Senator is required … it would make us all proud if you were first.

Respectfully,
M.T. Karthik

and to her credit, Senator Boxer made history, contesting the election and voting alone for the Election of 2004 to be investigated for fraud, a point since alleged by Representative Robert F Kennedy, Jr and several other congressional members.

The latest incarnation of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia – a wickedly clever postmodern play about meaning, mathematics, sex, literature and academia – will open in Tokyo on October 14, with a cast of actors from across the English-speaking world.

Irish Director Conor Hanratty’s education in classical Greek has included Bachelors and Masters degrees in theater and trips to Greece to observe the ancient dramas live. He is in Japan on academic exchange from Dublin to study iconoclastic Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa (about whom he is writing a book) and, in his spare time, has connected with Tokyo International Players (TIP) to direct the dense and witty Stoppard two-act, which, as he puts it, poses far more questions than it answers while still managing to leave the audience wondrously sated. “The questions Arcadia raises really don’t go away,” Hanratty says, “asking, why we’re here and ‘why do things survive’ and ‘why do things get lost’ and ‘do we find them again’?

“There’s a wonderful moment in the play when the tutor turns to his pupil and says, “It’s okay, you know, we lose things and we carry things with us but it doesn’t matter because the important thing is the march that we’re on, and there’s nothing outside that, so even if we drop something, someone else will pick it up later.’ And they talk about all of the lost plays of the Athenians in Greece – which is, of course, close to my heart. Just very recently they found a big lump of a new Sophocles play that we didn’t have before, so it’s quite timely that they talk about these things that will reappear eventually … they do.”

The play takes place in one room in different times set apart by two centuries, and pits academics in sexual dalliances against a discussion of events muddled by history. American assistant director Robb Dahlke says, “I especially find intriguing Stoppard’s theme of not knowing exactly what has happened in the past – the mistakes that can be made by circumstantial evidence; how something can be read one way leading in the wrong direction from what actually happened.”

TIP is the oldest English language theater company in Japan, having a history of a remarkable 109 years and employing an entirely volunteer cast and crew made up of English-speaking actors and hands that happen to be in Tokyo. “That’s the difficulty,” remarks Briton Alice Hackett, who plays Hannah in the production, “you never can be sure you’re going to be able to cast a play with exactly the right pool of people. You have to count on what’s available. But that’s also very challenging for the actors who are available … you might find yourself playing slightly older than you normally would or in an accent you might not normally be acting in. It’s a great opportunity to try out new things.”

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, Directed by Conor Hanratty, October 14-16, will be performed at the Tokyo American Club, for more information: http://www.tokyoplayers.org

I found this interview I did with Eric Drooker on the Great Lawn in Central Park. Before I post it on the date it took place, I’m putting it here – because I think more people will hear it that way. Hope so.

I anchored news coverage for KPFK radio in Los Angeles during Governor Davis’s Recall to perhaps a quarter million listeners. Backed by solid investigative reporting and original interviews with numerous sources, my staff and I wrote what I would deliver after Schwarzenegger declared victory.

I co-authored and authorized the use of these words to introduce the new Governor. Much thought and weeks of effort went into it – listen:

I was initially suspended for my actions, but listeners protected me and I defended myself with sources and original reporting we had done into Schwarzenegger’s background for each of the adjectives we used to describe the new Governor.

In the end the phrase “sexual predator” was the issue. But I had, myself personally interviewed women for our news program who claimed it. Several others on our staff had interviewed other women complaining of it as well.

These were women who had been unheard by the State, likely because of Schwarzenegger’s power. We were the only news outlet affording them airtime. I made that call. As a journalist, I felt obliged.

I don’t know if anyone else described it like this on mass media, but I doubt it. Now years later, Arnold’s sexual problems have been revealed publicly and his marriage dissolved from it. We were right. We said it … and few people heard.

and just a few minutes later, I was asked to describe and explain it to Londoners, who were just waking up to the fact that the movie actor Arnold Schwarzenegger had just won the Governorship of California.

MTK on British morning drive time radio.

That was 12 years ago, I was 33 and a news director with the backing of a huge progressive community in Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network – we were a voice for that community. That was the last of many lonely moments in that year for myself and our listeners.

An Austrian, Arnold Schwarzenegger, stole the Governorship of California because Democrats couldn’t effectively prevent a Republican-forced Recall Election of Governor Gray Davis, nor, once the Recall was in effect, competently back the supremely qualified Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante to victory (many in the State claimed it was because he was a Latino. ouch … 2003.)

Friends, enemies, colleagues, compatriots, Pacificans, idealogues and free radicals – a quick note at the end of summer:

Summer 2003

THEM:
Systematic Claims by the Pentagon that the Occupation of Iraq was wrapping-up, with quick, public replacements (in television terms) of all major players involved in the actual conflict. Powell for Rumsfeld, Garner for Franks, McClellan for Fleischer, Folksy Bush taking advantage of the summer to do the one thing he does well … chumminess with boorish, Fourth-of-July loving Amerikka (Bush’s Birthday is right around then)

Franks was retired quickly and out of sight because he was named in the ICC lawsuit by nineteen Iraqis (Bush actually thanked Franks by name in the “End of the War” reality TV Show he produced for May 1st on the USS Lincoln) and the diplomatic flap resulting over threats from the US against Belgium in NATO and this has led to the current split over EU/NATO Security Issues. By contrast, Fleischer got a resignation party, the image of an honorable discharge.

The Establishment of a puppet council of 25 men, many of whom have not been in Iraq for more than twenty years. This Council has a red, white and blue flag and at least one of its members, Ahmad Chalabi, is actually a convicted criminal – a man who stole from Jordanian interests via a family-owned entity called Petra Bank.

IRAQIS:
Car bombed the United Nations, assassinated envoy. Truck-bombed the Jordanian Embassy, and continuous guerrilla warfare against Anglo-American forces leading to more deaths of American soldiers since Bush declared war over and Iraq free.

M.T. Karthik: Germany now. crash of space shuttle/condolences
thanking powell for info … emph. that the UN is the place for this

(QUOTE) findings have to be examined carefully
findings of powell co-incide with much of our other info
we must work with all info to clarify quickly and fully
and iraq has to answer elements provided today by powell
this is why the sanctions w/ no-fly exist

iraq must disarm

the presence of the inspectors has already effectively reduced the threat

but still the full disarmament is goal of res. 1441

iraq must answer w/out delay.

future trips by blix and baradei

1441 provides for the tools … the dangers of military action and its conseq.
are plain to see. we must continue to seek peaceful solution

in the world of the 21st century the un is

MTK says: (wow, idealistic words) …

(QUOTE CONTINUED) on the basis of 1441 we need to enhance the instruments

we need a tougher approach

by tightening inspections we are creating an opportunity for a peaceful solution

french colleague made proposals we should consider (wow)

MTK says: sounds like … USA/UK/SPA/BUL/CHILE vs.
RUS/GER/FRA/MEX/SYR/GUI/PAK/ANG
IRAQ has now been invited to speak …

(QUOTE) my delegation extends congratulations to Germany on assumption of the presidency of the council.

IRAQ
we wish we had more time than a few minutes to rebutt a two-hour presentation and accusation by Powell … I shall be polite and brief.

the pronouncements in powell’s statement are utterly unrelated to the truth

no new info was provided

mere sound recordings that cannot be ascertained as genuine …

you might have seen me smile when the tapes were played here

(QUOTE, CONTINUED) there were words I will not translate

there are false assumptions, incorrect assumptions etc … in this tape

S. Hussein has said we are totally with/out WMD.

we have been saying it for over a decade.

Christopher says: (is that Aziz?)

MTK: powell could have saved all of us the time by providing the info to the UNMOVIC and IAEA (no … another foreign minister)

Christopher says:(valid point)

MTK: (REPEAT) Powell could have saved all of us the time by providing the info to the UNMOVIC and IAEA

(QUOTE CONTINUED) at any rate the forthcoming visits by Blix and co. on 8th will continue to verify …
… detailed info coming
and we are working daily w/ inspectors.
… NOV 27, 2002 … inspectors cranked up with more than 250 UNMOVIC and IEAE staff including more than 100 inspectors
as of FEB 4 of this year: 575 inspect. 321 sites
sites named in bush’s report sept 12, 2002, and blairs report and cia reports topped the lists by inspectors … and they ascertained all allegations were not true

this confirms we are w/out WMD.

water, soil, plants and air samples were taken.

factory remnants and production remnants from vast areas

throughout iraq

analyses … show … conclude: absence of any indication of prescribed chem,
bio or radiological agents or of any …
(DETAILED etc …)

END QUOTE. EDITORIAL BEGINS.

MTK says: Blix confirmed – Times, Jan 30, 2003
gotta go … sorry Christopher, have to run to the station now …

MAN TRANSLATING SPANISH TELEVISION: The game plan was this: to bomb Washington D.C., to bomb New York City, to bomb Chicago.
<BREAK>

MAN: I can’t communicate. I can’t even communicate with my sister. I can’t even communicate with the people up there. I can’t even communicate with my boss. I don’t know.
<BREAK>

EXT. DELI, 15 Bushwick
A.E. Williams: It’s September 11th, two thousand and one and uh, the polls have been closed, the world trade centers- buildings, have- (beat) are gone.
<BREAK>

INT. 53 Bushwick, #3
(the sound of television reporting the news)
M-H. Balle: -had a dream about last night. I had a dream about UFO’s last night (notices tape recorder) -Oh, God, No, No, No!
M.T. Karthik: Yes! Listening to what you’re saying right now, I am sure that I’ll want to hear this back later on so-
MHB: Oh, please! Fuck you! Are you being condescending?
AEW: (negatively) mm-mm. No Way.
MHB: And am I being paranoid?
AEW: Well, what is paranoia, right? (points at TV)
MHB: I’ve never-
AEW: That’s not paranoia!
MHB: I told Alison earlier today that I wrote a story called falling debris about a year ago. And the story essentially was that it surprises me that I am not hit by falling debris more often than I am – which is never.
MTK: which is never.
MHB: Right, I’ve never been hit by falling debris.
MTK: Right
AEW: She’s always afraid of shit that’s falling out of buildings.
MTK: Right.
MHB: I’m afraid of- I’m afraid- I’ve always- Not afraid, but I walk around in Manhattan – especially lower Manhattan and I look up and I’m like, ‘The fact that this shit isn’t falling down on me for whatever reason amazes me.’ – the fact that these buildings are allowed to stand.
MTK: Allowed to stand?
MHB: Yeah. I have to like, I have to hook up my other computer and print something out because-
TV: … a couple of years ago about how much U.S. authorities … attack … and now …
MHB: They’re gone now of course. We’re looking at (laughs) footage of what used to be the world trade centers. (laughs)
TV: -’ve on the phone right now, someone who both in fact and fiction has dealt with this … in …
MHB: … it’s so – They’ve already brought up-
TV: Tom Clancy-
MHB: Tom Clancy, by the way (laughing)
TV: Uh, Mr. Clancy, uh, this is uh-.
MHB: There it is! Tom Clancy.
TV: I guess a terrible case of life imitating art
Tom Clancy: It’s a noteworthy incident, I mean, it’s not the sort of thing – It’s the sort of thing that’s best left in a novel rather than in real life. Unfortunately one of the problems with being an author is keeping up with reality.
TV: But Mr. Clancy, you also are very well plugged into this world-
MHB: he’s plugged into this world-
TV: From your own knowledge-
MHB:He’s plugged in, baby-
TV: -how concerned have the authorities been
MHB: -to this world!
AEW: (laughing)
TV: – that something of this scale could possibly hit on the- o-o-on American soil?
CLANCY: It’s Jeff Greenfield, right?
GREENFIELD: Yeah, yes.
CLANCY: Well, you’ve been here to the house. It’s uh, I had a conversation some years ago with an Air Force General about a possibility rather like this – I ended up putting it in one of my books – where you know a bad guy takes an aircraft-
MHB: a bad guy! (laughing)
TC: -into the Capitol building during a Joint Session of Congress – which, you know, could effectively decapitate the whole government-
MHB: (hysterical laughter)
TC: uh, (laughing, also) I don’t know, at the time it seemed rather humorous. You know, I said, ‘Surely you’ve thought about things like this,’ and he says, ‘Well you know, to the best of my knowledge nobody in my office has looked at this but I promise you Monday morning they will be.’ Presumably they have been- you know, they’ve considered this possibility for some time … the- the big problem is a person who is willing to, to lose his own life voluntarily in a, in a terrorist incident. People like that are relatively rare because self-preservation is indeed the first law of nature and a per-it’s not too many people that want to throw their lives away and those who do it generally do it for religious reasons because they think there’s something good waiting for them on the other side of death- Uh, in a case like this that’s going to lead people towards, you know, talking about Is-Is-Islamic fanatics but we need to remember that Islam is a religion and it’s a religion with beliefs not necessarily very different ….
MHB: …voluntarily deciding that they want to lose their lives … or that they wish to or that they’re willing to. So fuck you on the ‘lose your life thing.’ To declare war is not a statement decided by Congress, right? Why is it any different from a guy who lives in Omaha, Nebraska deciding that he wants to- deciding that he is willing to go to … Europe during world war two and fight. This is different than a man or a woman who decides to fly a plane into the world trade center.
GREENFIELD: -officials, uh, in doing the research – did they see an attack of this enormity or were they more concerned with the sort of smaller kind of hit and miss that we’ve followed the last several years?
CLANCY: Well, you don’t ordinarily expect terrorists to display this degree of expertise. I mean, flying an airplane is not all that ea- <channel click>
MHB: (laughter) I can’t believe that Tom Clancy is the authority on terrorism now. How many more books do you think he might sell tomorrow? <click>
VOICE: but unfortunately you know the security you have in airports because your dealing with human beings is not perfect (unintelligible)
MHB: Actually I think he’s big on books on tape, too.
CLANCY: Somebody very carefully and <click>
<click>
CLANCY: -madman- <click>
MHB: “madman”
<click>
MHB: Wait- unedited video-
YOUNG GIRL: -huge cars – I’m standing on the corner and watching and taking pictures you could see the wings of the plane sticking out at least in the middle of the second building. (beat) I think they were delivering bombs. The explosion went up on that last one.
MHB: You know what I love-
MTK: “They were delivering bombs”
MHB: It’s the “they”.
YOUNG GIRL: Although it was probably a bomb inside the plane. They saw it to.
MHB: I’ve heard this word “they” many many many times.
YOUNG MAN ASIAN: The explosion went up like a mushroom. The second uh, the second building-
MAN W/AUSTRALIAN ACCENT: (fast) The second plane was an old prop engine plane like an old Cessna?
INTERVIEWER: Say that again.
AUSTRALIAN: (slower) The second plane was like an old prop plane, like a dual prop plane, like a Dakota(r) or something like that – It wasn’t a Dakota, but.
MHB: another authority here.
AUSTRALIAN: -it came in low from over the ocean …

[witnesses are interviewed]

MHB: Can we get Spanish? I want the Spanish channel- or Disney! I’m curious what’s on Disney- <click> lets see what else is going on in the television world <changing channels>“countless acts of kindness” can we record this term, “countless acts of kindness” thank you. Yeah, well, let’s get BET TV on right here. I think BET TV might sum it all up for you right here.

[lots of channels, skipping around, pieces of soundbites]

MHB: That’s another thing-
[Spanish for some time]
MTK: OK, now we’ve had enough-
VOICE: (female) a source from New York City saying it is likely … it is possible that thousands of lives have been lost-
MTK: Look, (reading scroll) the White House, Pentagon and Capitol have been evacuated – look, the White House, Pentagon and the Capitol-
MHB: thousands of lives have been lost, is that what they’re saying now?
VOICE: at least in the United States, uh, in addition, the Federal Reserve- <click>

<channels skip about more, an old Saturday Night Live episode is on with a spoof of H. Ross Perot driving down the road with his running mate from when he ran for office>

<BREAK>

MHB: -to anger, retaliation, envy, jealousy, hatred, paranoia.
MTK: This is what revolution leads to.
MHB: Well I do- not- I do believe that these are some of the things – I’m not saying that there the only things – these are some of the worst things components of what revolution can lead to. I mean look at what’s happened in other revolutionary scenarios? I mean look at China, look at the Soviet Union, and I believe that this is a statement, that says- I mean we are- the targets are two significant institutions: one, the military industrial complex which is directly linked to the world trade org- World Trade. Multi-national.
MTK: You don’t think- peaceful revolution is impossible you think?
MHB: I don’t- I believe it is- the point that I am making is that I don’t think that this- I mean, to me this is a revolutionary act.
MTK: It is?
MHB: I believe it is-
MTK: Is it a terrorist act?
MHB: It’s a terrorist- well, yes. But we need to define terrorism. This is a terrorist act, which you know, I’m going to assume that this a terrorist act as it’s being called.
MTK: Oh, wow, so you are going to give credence to every single person who’s naming this-
MHB: No, no-
MTK: We’ve got to turn the mute on immediately- immediately (TV cuts off)
MHB: I’m talking about, if this is a terrorist act, which I believe it is.
MTK: You believe it is because you have been told it is.
MHB: No, as a matter of fact no one has actually said that it is yet, right?
AEW: Yes.
MHB: They have? Oh, they have made the statement that this is a terrorist act?
MHB: I’ve heard-
MTK: They had a terrorism timeline!
MHB: I’ve heard- no one has officially been willing – other than Bush who has said the following thing: “I will hunt down the people responsible,” right? So, there is a hunt, yes. So, here we have a res- now we already have the first tenet of what happens in a revolutionary act, which is the desire for vengeance, “to hunt down.” So the statement that’s being made here, very clearly it seems to me, is a statement that says: the military-industrial complex, the world- the world trade scenario as it stands-
MTK: hang on, hang on … are you sure it’s not just that drunk people shouldn’t fly planes?
MHB: No. This is too significant to be drunk people shouldn’t fly planes. Drunk people who shouldn’t fly planes, accidentally hit small buildings like the ones we live in now.

MHB: We were talking not that long ago about the question of revolution. I think we were implying violence. We talked about guns. Remember we talked about guns?
MTK: We did?
MHB: We did in the bar at The Garden. And I was like, we were talking about it as a violence against- perpetrated or enacted by one individual towards another.
MTK: That’s what- that’s what you think of as revolution?
MHB: Well, yeah we were talking about it in that context at the Garden.
MTK: hmm, ok.
MHB: I mean, yeah, ‘cause I mean, certainly revolution is a broad stroke, I mean it can mean many things revolution in art, revolution in writing … although I don’t … there’s many-
AEW: It means ‘taking down,’ doesn’t it?
MTK: No, it means change.
MHB: see this gets very complicated.
MTK: Revolution is change.
MHB: Change happens every second, every moment-
MTK: Right. Revolution is a lot of change in a short amount of time. I’ll take the Webster’s dictionary and read the word revolution if you want.

[dictionary search conversation]

MTK: All right I’m going to try this out of the Webster’s [reads etymology and definitions of ‘revolution’ and gets to, reading] 2a. a sudden, radical and complete-
MHB: change?
MTK: change.
MHB: right.
MTK: (reading) b. a fundamental change in political organization especially the overthrow or renunciation of one government or ruler and the substitution of another by the governed.
MHB: Now, that’s more-
MTK: like the French revolution.
MHB: right.
[edit]
MHB: I would define it as an act of violence. I am opposed to the idea of revolution that is violent.
MHB: can we talk about this (points at TV) We are literally sitting here the three of us, watching a very significant occurrence.
MTK: You think so?
MHB: I do. Because the World Trade Center represents not only symbolically but structurally-
MTK: Mmmhmm
MHB: structurally there are mainframes that exist in those two buildings that are now gone-
AEW: 400 million dollars in each (unintelligible)
MHB: Yeah! The amount of money that is- ok there are several things: how much did it cost to build?
AEW: 400 million dollars?
MHB: How much does it cost to maintain? Not only that -Well, we know because they told us how much it cost to build- Not only that, what is the insurance – on those two buildings? Let’s think about who insures those two buildings? And my guess is it’s that insurance company in England.
MHB: I forget the name of that-
MTK: You know the name of it.
MHB: I forget the name-
MTK: Well I shan’t, uh, say it for you.
MHB: Please tell me, ‘cause I’m very bad with names, I always forget.
MTK: Chris Evert took the name, let’s put it that way, to return-
MHB: No, no, no tell me, tell me- I forget-
MTK: Are you a fan of tennis at all?
MHB: Kind of no, not really.
MTK: Chris Evert took the name, anyway what’s your point?
MHB: My point is that this has this rippling effect. These 50,000 people don’t get to go to work
MTK: Don’t get to go to work?
MHB: They don’t go to work anymore.
MTK: Don’t get to go to work?
MHB: They don’t get to go to work-
MTK: Oh-
MHB: Right they don’t.
MTK: poor kids
MHB: -seriously where do they go? I’m not talking about the people, I’m talking about the industry that exists around those two buildings. The actual industry-
MTK: Is there industry- is there actual industry?
MHB: Oh-, uh, well, 50,000 people work there-
MTK: -or is it just promotion of paper?
MHB: Oh, OK. Well, what is-
MTK: do they really work?
MHB: -capitalism? What is capitalism?
MTK: do they really work? do they really work? Or do they just move paper around to ensure that they stay powerful and wealthy?
MHB: But that’s my point.
MTK: it is?
MHB: That’s the point I’m making-
MTK: Ohhhh.
MHB: -about these two buildings- These two buildings structurally-
(phone rings AEW answers)
MHB: -maintain a (sic) international system. These two buildings, because they are called the world trade centers are symbolic of world trade. They are symbolic of trade, international trade. People who sit at computers who move things from place to place – who organize and move things are in sort of, from the lowest-
MTK: and they can be anywhere. They don’t have to be here.
MHB: No, it’s true, but structurally we don’t have a place to put these 50,000 people right now.
MTK: That’s not true, there’s a huge, massive place to put them.
MHB: OK, well, let me tell ya, it’ll be a while before these people will find another home to work in.
MTK: Yeah, but they have insurance.
MHB: Which they do, back to my original statement about the insurance company-
MTK: which is?
MHB: -that has to cover this.
MTK: unh, hunh?
MHB: The point that I am making is that there is an incredible, symbolic statement that is being made here – and The Pentagon – it symbolizes the military-industrial complex which is obviously connected to the protection of world trade and capitalism
MTK: This is the military-industrial-entertainment complex.
MHB: Well, but that’s the-
MTK: That’s what this is …
MHB: well, it’s more than just –
MTK: … which is equally vile.
MHB: Right. Right. Well, so it’s all one big package deal – but it is a significant thing. And it’s- and to me – you know as much as I find this disturbing, and I do … it’s surreal. It’s incredible. It’s … it’s going to have rippling effects.
MTK: You think so.

<BREAK>

AEW: (on telephone) -skin, black hair, uh, Muslim-
MHB: I just want to say I’m drunk right now-
MTK: rippling effects?
MHB: I’m saying it’s going to have a rippling effect. I don’t think this is very- I mean this is not cloaked conversation – it’s going to have a rippling effect. We already- It already has one. All airports in the country have been shut down. You cannot get into Manhattan, all the subways have been shut down. You cannot call into Manhattan, all the phones have been shut down. You cannot watch even television unless you have cable because everybody transmits from downtown. We have just closed the voting booths. We have a primary, the most significant primary in New York City history, perhaps, has just been stopped.
MTK: subverted.
MHB: right, subverted. So if this doesn’t have rippling effects, nothing will. And a minimal loss of life. Now, there’s another interesting thing: this could have been in the middle of the day, the decision was made not to make this in the middle of the day – not to fly two planes into the world trade center simultaneously at two-thirty in the afternoon. After lunch when everybody’s back in the office.
MTK: It could have been right at lunch, when everybody was out at the lunch spot so they could have a good viewing position (sarcasm).
MHB: But it’s still- you have less- you- actually, the fact is that in most of the- and this is another thing to- understand and- the way that Americans work- I mean most Americans, especially at the world trade centers start around 8.
AEW: (on phone) and the borders closed now.
MHB: This is the first bombing – the first bombing, – the first airplane arrived at whatever, seven-thirty-five, so, about a half an hour before most people got into the office. (beat) Most people- I know people who work there – they generally start between eight and nine. The second plane arrives around what? Nine? … Nine o’clock. So by now you have had at least an hour to evacuate the building.
MTK: I find this um …
MHB: The idea is to not …
MTK: boring.
MHB: This is boring?
MTK: Yeah.
MHB: Why is this boring to you?
MTK: same shit, different day.
MHB: You don’t think that the – (smirking) that the fact that there is no world trade center isn’t significant? The fact that the Pentagon-
MTK: If I believed there was none, it would be significant (a) and if …even if I even if – even if I did- even if there wasn’t one. What I’m sure of is that precautionary measures on the part of the people who have constructed the entire economy protect the wealthy from any real exigency or problem and the people who are going to be suffering are the ones down at the bottom getting the crumbs-
MHB: absolutely.
MTK: so, it’s the same shit, different day-
MHB: no, I understand that part-
MTK: -as far as I’m concerned.
MHB: But I’m talking about – I think I mentioned earlier – this is incredibly significant symbolically. Which is the point that I am making about why you make- I mean, if you wanted to make a decision to make a statement about the world trade – about world trade – so, hence, world trade center – with minimal loss of life-
MTK: Hmmm.
MHB: I mean, I agree with what you are saying. You do it because you know the people who go to work everyday are not – the goal is not to kill 50,000 people, the goal is to glue all of us to this symbol.
MTK: (laughs)
MHB: The entire world is watching this right now, right? 50,000 people didn’t die. Had you done it at 3:00 or 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon, everybody practically would have been back from lunch right now. So you make it strategic. You evacuate everyone at 7:45, and you fly another plane in – and whether or not there were bombs in those planes-
MTK: Well, you’re teaching me about terrorism which is something I know nothing about-
MHB: I’m not teaching you about terrorism, I’m being-
MTK: Yeah you are …
MHB: -very presumptuous.
MTK: you are literally telling me how to do it … what time of day-
MHB: I’m being presumptuous. I’m assuming that I understand the scenario here which is that there could have been 50,000 people in that building at 3:00 this afternoon. We could be going about our business right now, and it’s what? (looks at clock) 12:30.
MTK: Well, I’d like to go about my daily business, actually.
MHB: Right. So you should. And there’s no reason why you can’t. No one’s forcing you to stay here.
MTK: My daily business is voting.
MHB: Right, but you can’t vote.
MTK: I can.
MHB: No, because- the el- the booths are closed. The booths – the election booths are closed (laughing)
MTK: Well, see the funny thing about that is-
MHB: It’s primary day! How interesting is that?
MTK: um, then it’s not subversion then, is my point, it’s complicity. And complicity at that point, becomes a joke for you to be so presumptuous. So, as you continually get drunk and-
MHB: Wait, wait, wait, no, no, don’t bring in my being drunk because I don’t think that I’m being irrational-
MTK: I don’t either, but I just think you’re being presumptuous to the point of like-
MHB: but wai-wai-
MTK: you’re telling me I can do what I want-
MHB: No, you can-
MTK: – and yet in point of fact you’re not telling me I can do what I want-
MHB: No, you said you wanted to vote-
MTK: – and then your saying there is a subversion of-
MHB: No but I already brought up the voting thing, I already brought that up. I was like, I talked- I said- I mentioned several things- we can go ba- and that’s what’s great about this tape- we can go back and I- I had mentioned several things that have now been subverted because of this event and one of them was the primary.
MTK: and you believe that?
MHB: Well- I don’t think it’s an accident. Do you think that it’s just incidental? Is this fate? Two planes just happened to crash into the world trade center?
MTK: I don’t make- I don’t make judgements until I have seen the evidence-
MHB: Oh. Oh well, I’m being presumptuous – as I said earlier, I’m being presumptuous.
MTK: For example, air traffic controllers have much more power than pilots, for example –
MHB: They do.
MTK: and something could have happened where air traffic control is going on –
MHB: You’re right- I’m being
MTK: and what’s going on-
MHB: completely presumptuous.
MTK: is … as far as I’m concerned is-
MHB: an accident.
MTK: -absurdly presumptuous.
MHB: ah, well, I’m just saying that … I’m making a statement of presumption.
MTK: Yes, you are.
MHB: I said that several times. (beat goes to kitchen) I said that several times, Karthik. I’m not being, you know, I’m not being uh-
MTK: I am not resisting you.
MHB: -waffling here.
MTK: I am not resisting you.. I am not resisting you.
MHB: I know you’re not.
MTK: I am not resisting you.
MHB: I’m just surprised that this hasn’t happened already, I guess.

MTK: I am starting with the Office of Public Advocate itself which I think is a truly unique political position. Why are you interested in the position of public advocate, coming from where you’re coming. Why is it attractive to you?

SCOTT STRINGER: I happen to agree with you. There is no other office that I can see like it in the United States. It’s an innovative position. It’s a creative position. It’s a new position. And in light of the fact that the government of New York is going to go through a wholesale change – a new mayor, a new comptroller, a new public advocate, 37 new city council members, four out of five borough presidents, the whole city government will be brand new. There’s going to be a tremendous generational change, a more diverse city council. I think the public advocate can play a meaningful role in the government of New York. That’s why I decided to run.

MTK: What do you think of the job Mark Green has done – specifically – since he was the first elected public advocate? What kind of public advocate would you be by comparison?

SS: I think Mark’s done a good job. I mean when you’re the first it’s the most difficult position to go in – plus he did not have a cooperative mayor. But he carved out a niche on consumer issues, on police brutality issues. I think he was a good watchdog and I think he molded the office into something very important.

When Rudy Giuliani tried to convene the Charter Revision Commission to do away with the position, the public reacted. In fact, they reacted to the job Mark had done, because the editorials and a lot of folks said, ‘we shouldn’t have a public advocate.’ So I’d give him, you know – I think he’s done a very good job in the position. The question is, though, “Where do you take it?” and that’s the challenge and that’s going to take some work and some creativity. I think a lot of us who are running would say that Mark has done a good job but we want to now elevate it.

I would like to see some of the Charter mandated powers. With those charter mandated powers, I would like to see us work on those issue and use them – I think that the role of Mark’s appointment – the public advocate’s appointment – to the City Planning Commission can be a very exciting one, in terms of being involved in urban planning and land usages and building communities, preserving neighborhoods, protecting our diversity. You can do that, I mean, having an appointment to the City Planning Commission allows you to have a seat at the table on some major development issues – whether it’s rational development or – real planning issues. So I would like to see the public advocate’s office have a land use unit, have a way to deal with those kind of– those communities throughout the city.

You know, you sit on the employee pension system, you decide where investments go and who invests. And that’s powerful. You’re there with the mayor and comptroller and labor unions who have a vote and borough presidents. I mean you can really shape economic policy and that puts you at that table. How are we going to deal with pension investments almost like part of a comptroller’s office to a certain extent.

You are also a legislator in the city council. You vote when there’s ties, but you can debate, you can legislate. You can serve ex-officio. You are to serve ex-officio on city council committees. What better place for a legislator who in 8 years has cast 18, 16,000 votes in Albany to come down in a new council and be able to legislate while you have a vote on the city planning commission, while you sit on the pension fund and while you serve as the chief ombudsperson for the entire city? I mean, the ombudsman’s position has been around for a long time, Paul O’Dwyer advocated it way before Mark Green, part of the city council president’s office.

But what I have tried to do in my office – I do tremendous constituent service – where we’ve been successful is analyzing where those complaints are coming from and then look at it from a larger issue. So when MCI was doing those 10-10 false – you know that faulty advertising with the movie stars telling you that if you call the 10-10 numbers you’re going to save money. We got complaints in our office from our constituents and then we did our own survey and found out that wait a minute, those ads aren’t telling the truth. They’re wrong. MCI got fined a 100,000 dollars, federally, based on our study – when it was on Dateline and that’s energy and excitement because you deal with your constituent unit in the public advocate’s office.

But then if you’re smart you can monitor for major issues. You can monitor city agencies. You can track them through constituent complaints. You can look at studies. I used to chair the task force on people with disabilities in Albany. We got complaints about federal, state, city buildings having barriers to access for our constituents. We did a report on it – found a hundred barriers to access in 14 government buildings. Let’s legislate, let’s call in the mayor to do something about it. That’s what we did as an Assembly member. But as the Ombudsman you can do it with a whole staff, with energetic people who can scour the borough, monitoring things, getting out into the street, and as ombudsman you can be out in the neighborhood.

MTK: I think that’s what separates the people who want to eliminate the position from those who want to keep it – a real ombudsman – Paul O’Dwyer’s vision of the position.

SS: The role of the ombudsman has been sort of evolving. And the way I look at it is you know, you get constituent complaints and you send people out into the streets. We’re going to figure out a way to pay for a Winnebago and we’re going to get people out in the boroughs and around the city, learning about what’s going on and then use our investigative unit, our investigative powers to check things out. I have just used that as a model as a member of the Assembly for many years and I think it works. So I’d like to expand the ombudsman’s office. When you put all that together – all these different roles, it’s a special office. I’m an Assemblyman. I vote on the budget and I legislate and I do my constituent service. That’s what I do. As public advocate, you can do it all. You can do things.

And then you have to use other experiences. You are a city-wide elected official in a diverse city, a changing city. So who you work with and how you build coalitions – I mean in our campaign we are very proud of the fact that we are building a multi-racial, intergenerational campaign. That’s good politics, but then that’s going to be good government. So to try to build a network to rally around issues could be very exciting.

MTK: Many issues that will come under your purvey have demographic or even racial overtones – housing, education, police, welfare issues to some degree. And I think also the new census is going to show a very diverse New York. Now, you’re background strikes me as from this area. Can you tell me about your relationship with the rest of the city?

SS: Well, I didn’t grow up on the Upper West Side, I grew up in Washington Heights. Went to CUNY, went to public schools. Got interested in politics when a relative of mine ran for Congress, Bella Abzug, back in the 70’s, my mother followed as a member of the City Council. So I was one of these kids –

MTK: What relation was Bella Abzug to you?

SS: She was my mother’s cousin. So Bella ran the district, we got involved and learned a lot and so I always had an interest. I moved to the west side and got involved with Congressman Jerry Nadler, worked for him, got elected a District Leader. When he went to Congress, I ran successfully for the Assembly and have been there ever since – 1992. So my relationship with the rest of the city is … not just representing this community but I’ve had life experience where we’ve interacted with different people from all different backgrounds. I’ve tried to work on diversity issues because I have a genuine interest in them all my life – even before I was in the Assembly. I worked to preserve the Mitchell-Loma Housing Program, got involved in a lot of tenant organizing before the Assembly.

MTK: Do you speak any other languages?

SS: No. I can barely speak English (laughs). No, I don’t. But I have worked in communities where different languages are spoken and with people from different backgrounds. And in the Assembly I have worked on issues that impact poor people or communities of color. I was the only Democrat in the Assembly to take the most “no” votes in the Pataki budgets in the mid-90’s. I stood up alone. I stood up alone on the commuter tax – that we shouldn’t eliminate the commuter tax. I was the only Democrat to vote against the rent-regulation compromise – the only Democrat. I am very independent.

MTK: That’s huge.

SS: Yeah. I was the only person to do it. It was very huge in a legislature that’s dominated by the speaker. I have taken him on and the Assembly. I mean, you don’t vote no on compromise budgets. You don’t vote no when everybody else is going along and I have chosen to do that. That was the role.
I was one of the first Jewish, if not the first Jewish legislator, to get arrested at One Police Plaza and went to jail because I thought it was the right thing to do and then people followed. And I have marched and protested and organized because I believe in the diversity of the city, I really do. When the KKK came to New York, it was my office and my office alone that worked with the clergy, religious groups of all different persuasions and we had the biggest peacetime rally at (TK site name and RES: event), I don’t know if you remember it.

MTK: I do.

SS: That was my rally. We did it. And that’s the kind of stuff I want to do as public advocate with a larger staff and a bigger budget. I think those kinds of things will enhance things in the city for people. People loved that debate.

The best thing was The New York Times did a story on the rally – didn’t mention me – but talked about how parents brought their children to see the Klan. To me – you know usually politicians are like, “where do they mention me?” – it’s an article that I’ve wanted to frame because it was such a – the spirit of it, you know – to have parents bring their kids …

So these are some of the issues I’ve worked on. And in Albany I have been effective. I’ve worked on police brutality legislation in Albany with the Black and Puerto Rican caucus. I’ve been effective dealing with the Republicans in the Senate. You know, to be independent, you can be liberal, you can be progressive, but if you’re not effective, you know … then how are you going to deal with a diverse city council? I have passed a lot of laws – seven years to pass the New York stalking law, four years to pass the auto-protection bill that allowed women to get – especially poor women – to get police officers to serve auto-protection on their abusers. That was a bill that got vetoed by Governor Pataki that I got signed into law. (TK – RES: what is this all about?)

MTK: You mentioned the relationship between Mark Green and the Mayor and have said you’d like to evolve the position. Well, evolving the position requires a mayor who is warm to that. Which of the candidates for Mayor do you get along with best and do you think there is a specific problem between the mayor and the public advocate that could be ameliorated some other way, from your experience.

SS: If you’re going to run for public advocate you’re going to have to be prepared to knock heads with the mayor. There’s an inevitable conflict. You monitor their city agencies. You speak out when you think there’s an injustice. You’re going to issue critical reports. You’re going to organize coalitions. You are going to be out in the streets where the mayor is going to be in city hall. Sure, there is going to be a conflict. The creativity of the individual is what’s going to come into play here. Can you maintain your independence? Can you do the coalition building and organizing on issues that sometimes may not be popular? But at the same time both in the city council and in negotiations with the mayor, can you accomplish things? Can you see your ideas and your criticisms come to a point of being successful in the end. That’s what makes this office so interesting. On the one hand, there’s that natural antagonism, on the other hand, you’re a working council member, trying to introduce legislation, you want to get bills passed. You’re the ombudsman. You need cooperation with city agencies. It’s better than not having it. It’s a challenging job to do that.

I think what I bring to the table is that ability. I think I have proven it in Albany in a place where you have live Republicans running around that control things, a Governor in Pataki, and the Senator, Joe Bruno. I’ve been able to do both. I’ve been one of the more independent Assembly members but I’ve been effective. I took committees like the task force for people with disabilities that was just given to me because I didn’t have enough seniority to get a lu-lu, and we made it into something. Started holding hearings, we issued reports and we made the mayor come out and say, “Hey you know …” made his office say, “You know, you’re right.” We’ve protected people with disabilities and we’ve made that task force something. I’m proud of the fact that I was appointed chair of the Oversight, Analysis and Investigation committee of the Assembly, in part because people recognized what …

MTK: and the candidates for mayor?

SS: I like them all. I haven’t taken a position. I want to hear what they have to say.

MTK: You are not an attorney.

SS: No.

MTK: Yet much of the power of the Office of Public Advocate is reliant on legal procedure, subpoenas, lawsuits. You’ve even said it will require creativity. Don’t you think it will require creative legal work to empower the position? And if you are not an attorney, isn’t that a problem?

SS: Part of government is having people of different experiences in government. I think there is certainly a role for attorneys in politics. We certainly have a lot of attorneys. I’ve been an Assembly member for over eight years. I haven’t been an Attorney but I’ve introduced and passed a whole lot of pieces of legislation. I’ve been effective in terms of dealing with the rules of Albany and understanding the legal ramifications of legislation and probably have – certainly the council members who are running for public advocate and I obviously have the most legislative experience. I certainly would match my legislative record with the attorneys. I know where to find a good lawyer if we have to file a lawsuit because that person will be called the Counsel to the Public Advocate. We’ll have a Deputy Public Advocate and when I say we have to bring a lawsuit, we’ll bring a lawsuit. When I say … But I can read my own bills. I can introduce my own legislation. I can write my own legislation. And I’ve been doing it effectively for eight years.

Maybe one of the things we have to encourage is – and I think this is going to play out in the city council – certainly having a legal background is good, but we need teachers, we need union leaders in the council, we need younger people in the council, maybe we need people who work in day care in the council, we need parents in the council, maybe we even need a college student or so to come into this new government. I think it’s not just ethnic diversity, but it’s life experience diversity. I’ll know where to find a good lawyer.

MTK: It’s an interesting point, I mean, a 22 year old kid from the Bronx has just been elected.

SS: OK, yeah, I wouldn’t want to have a bunch of 22 year olds, but you know what? We have to create this balance so that we hear a young person’s agenda in the city. Because after all we do this for younger people. We certainly need to have some experienced people. But I think we have to recognize that the government is going to change. We need to elect a new generation of candidates. I am hoping that will inspire a new generation of ideas. We cannot continue to go the way we go. I think I offer that. We need some energy here. We need some people who do things differently. That’s why I decided to spend a year out of my life doing this thing?

MTK: In reading some background on you, I understand you were involved in saving the New York Historical Society in 1993. Did you meet Betsy Gotbaum then?

SS: Betsy and I are good friends. I played a major role in my first year in Albany in helping to rescue the Historical Society before Betsy was there. I was able to obtain 6 million dollars in State funding to get the Historical Society on its feet and I was very proud of that.

MTK: Is it odd though to be running against her?

SS: I think it’s funny. (laughing) Betsy has done a good job at the Historical Society. But I’m going to ask her though that she’s got to mention my small role in getting the ball rolling but we’re good friends and I like her very much.

MTK: Do you have specific issues in mind for the Office of Public Advocate?

SS: I want to build affordable housing. I wrote a housing plan based on how we built Mitchell-Loma housing after World War II during the 1950’s. We’ve got to build housing for middle income and working poor. I want to concentrate on developing a real plan. Not a Giuliani-600-million-dollar-out-the-door plan, “as I’m leaving we should build affordable housing.” Every mayoral candidate has got to come up with that plan. I think I have done a lot of research on what I think is a direction we should go, from a state point of view. I care very much about this economy and I am fascinated and interested in how we can expand e-commerce and deal with the digital divide and make sure that our kids can be competitive. I don’t think the answer is to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at large corporations, convincing them to stay here, when all they want is affordable housing and a trained workforce. This is no longer when I went to school and we had to compete with the kids in New York City. Now it’s, ‘We’ve got to compete globally.’ We’ve got to recognize that in this town real fast. I want to prod people who do have the power to make those changes. I think we do our kids a disservice. My office has worked on these issues. I serve on the education committee and the higher ed committee. We try to hold them to higher standards then we don’t give them the tools in the classroom to succeed. Over the summer we did a study after getting constituent complaints about the fact that 8th graders would be mandated to take 8th grade exams on how to use a microscope and a weight scale. So we surveyed half the school districts around the city to find out how many microscopes and weight scales were there. Well I don’t have to tell you the end of that story. We setup our kids for failure. So those kids would fail that exam and have to do summer school. This is after the state gave the highest educational dollars into the school system. I want to organize on the city level to deal with the issue of the inequity in school aid for our kids, for our kids in New York City. We just held a meeting, a kickoff meeting on the west side last week. But we gotta tell Pataki and the Republicans and those Democrats who won’t take a stand in upstate and suburban New York – we gotta make them understand that failing to give our kids proper education aid has meant dilapidated school buildings, poor school books, lack of computers. This is the struggle and I’m going to bring my Albany experience to the job of public advocate, because I’m going to know how to organize when these folks, colleagues, from upstate and suburban New York talk about how unreasonable we’re being. It’s not just about adjusting the school aid formula, it’s about doing needs assessment to make sure that the kids in poorer districts get more money and if you want to call it reparations that’s fine with me ‘cause that’s what we’re owed for our kids.

MTK: The CCRB and COPIC are both the responsibilities of the Public Advocate. Have you thought about how you might change either of these responsibilities, technologize them, (laughter) perhaps?

SS: I think that especially from a technological point of view there’s a lot– that the Internet and the entrepreneurial spirit of New York is tied into computerization and new technology that can deliver services. I’ve read some of Mark Green’s work in that area. I would like to expand on it.

We just convened under my sponsorship an Internet roundtable of Internet companies in New York City to try to begin at least from my thinking that kind of thinking. I hope to allow some specific proposals during the campaign.

MTK: How do you think the Office of the Public Advocate can be effective or can intercede into the negotiation space with regard to complaints of police brutality?

SS: I think Mark Green has done a wonderful job of documenting those complaints and suing the mayor and I think that he showed how effective the public advocate can be in relation to the CCRB and police brutality. The role that I think I can play – and I think we have to do this in terms of connecting the police to the community is one to deal with the fact that …. we need real recruitment in the NYPD. Not just Safir saying, “Oh yeah, let’s get the CUNY kids to do it.” We gotta make a case to people – not just to attract teachers, because we’re going to need 54,000 new teachers – but we’ve gotta go to the campuses in a meaningful way in a serious way to convince people who want to work in public service that this police department is worth being involved with. People did it backwards, once the s** hit the fan – please don’t put that in when you do this article –

MTK: Don’t worry.

SS: What we said was, OK go to CUNY and go get minority kids to be the cops, Go .. Go, go. What would you sell to them? What would be the benefit of that? Do they believe that they could have a-

MTK: Worse, the PBA’s running ads of cops shot dead in the streets while only getting paid $30,000 a year.

SS: Right. As if suddenly … African-American, Latino kids … that would appeal to them.
This has to happen internally. There has to be a commitment to open up the process. There has to be a commitment so that people who want to go back to their communities and protect those communities – which is a very worthwhile profession, and I think there’s a lot of interest to do it – that they can have career advancement; that there isn’t this tension with the police department. I’m going to work as public advocate to make sure that we do that kind of recruitment – not just on the campuses but in communities – and force the NYPD and the new mayor to make sure that there are in fact career opportunities and understand that the police is not the enemy of the people. I’m tired of hearing parents say to me, “I don’t worry about the criminal anymore, I worry about the cop.” If we’re going to do improvements, we’ve got to tone that down and that comes from the police department and then the mayor. And I hope to play that role.

MTK: And what about in specific instances of brutality. I think many people feel that the police are protected very much by the mayor. If you look at the instance of the Diallo shooting all four police officers were cleared of wrong-doing, found not-guilty on charges even of reckless endangerment.

SS: I support the following: I support – and a lot of this has to come from Albany but we’ve got to organize for this eventuality – police officers should live in New York, new police officers should definitely live in New York; if you’re going to shoot someone 41 times, you shouldn’t have 48 hours to get your story together – I don’t know of another jurisdiction where – you and I would not be accorded that benefit should that happen. I think when a gun is fired, he should be drug tested, and you should be drug and alcohol tested immediately. It’s like DWI. Cops pull you over, you may not have been drinking, but you should do a check. And I think we have to hold those officers to a higher standard. I also think that part of the failure of that TK, one city hall and the police department driving these kids – these inexperienced police officers – to make the arrest, make the arrest, by any means, shake people down, you know, by any cost. We need to have a supervisory effort here and restructure the department. You cannot sned young people out in plain clothes, give them a mandate that’s impossible to fill, without understanding the ramifications of it. I think New Yorkers understand, what every African-American and Latino parent understands that their children are in danger when they walk the streets in some quarters. Now having said that, we have wonderful police officers and one of the things that struck me during when I was arrested and things like that and talking to other cops: they were horrified by that. A lot of police officers don’t want to work under these conditions and I think those police officers should be elevated and we should search them out … they can be mentors – a lot of good cops, let’s not denigrate a whole department, you know there are bad politicians, there are bad teachers, every one of us – you know, there are bad journalists … believe it or not … no, you know-

MTK: Of that I’m a firm believer, are you kidding me? Look at the year we’re having … look at last year.

SS: So there’s a lot that we can do to work on these issues and I hope to be part of it – I have been part of it, both in Albany and on the streets of New York.

MTK: Do you think there is institutional racism in the police department or any other citywide agency?

SS: I think sure there have been a lot of instances where people’s racism comes out. I wouldn’t say it’s true in all instances. I wouldn’t want to label a whole city like that. I think there’s a lot of good people, too, who believe as I believe that we are a diverse city and that’s what attracts us to stay here and work here. The job of any elected official from the mayor to the public advocate is to look at that from a positive point of view and then root out racism and teach our kids that we do live in a diverse city – there’s a lot of things we should do on these issues. Part of the excitement of my campaign is we’re building a multiracial, intergenerational campaign. We’re young people, old people, african-american, latino, asian-american, gay, straight, and trans-gendered. It’s good politics, but I really believe this: imagine governing having gotten elected that way?

MTK: Especially now.

SS: It’s a great opportunity. And I’ll tell you this I’m learning – I tell you I’ve lived here all my life, grew up in Washington Heights, grew up in a multiracial community. This city is great. You’ve got neighborhoods upon neighborhoods, 5 blocks later you’re in another neighborhood. People live together and that’s the best part of this town. That’s why we live here and not in the suburbs.

MTK: Well … I guess I was thinking how as public advocate, how more aggressive you could be since as you pointed out you have this range of topics now available to you in a rather local context, as opposed to having to deal with other assembly people to make decisions or implement change. You said that you have the idea of evolving the position of Public Advocate. But I think a lot of the 60% or two thirds of the community that will show up in the census as non-white are going to want to know how it’s going to change. I want to know how progressive are you? Would you, for example suggest changes to the Charter with regard to empowering the position of public advocate?

SS: I mean I would argue that to do the job right, to have direct subpeona power – instead of just requesting through the city council for subpoenas – to have your own subpoena power would certainly enhance the office and would do a lot in terms of investigative powers.

MTK: Would you try to institutionalize that?

SS: Well, I mean … is it going to happen? No.

MTK: Well, why not, I mean, TK seats up on the city council maybe everyone’s going to be incredibly radically minded about how they want to change the office.

SS: I don’t think the new mayor’s going to – one of them said it’s not happening to me already. But to start with, I’m convinced that with the powers that exist right now, I can have a profound effect on the debate over the various issues that are going to face New York over the next four years. I would work within what the Charter mandated functions today. Obviously as we build coalitions and we get a sense of what the council’s like, probably, hopefully if people think that– going in if I can create a sense that this office is important, rather than just going in and saying in order to be effective guys I’m need this, this, this and this to happen, especially with a mayor and editorial boards that would argue-
<END SIDE>

SS: It’s easy to say that you can do these things but one thing I have learned in Albany is that certain change comes slowly and you have to be political in how you get to where you want to be and where you want to end up as part of this negotiation as part of this compromise. As long as you don’t sacrifice your principal belief system. And I do not believe I have done that in my years in Albany. Last year Pataki vetoed a very important bill that would allow early release of women prisoners to work-release programs, not to be freed because we ended parole but we left these hundred women –

MTK: to A.T.I. [alternatives to incarceration]

SS: Right. It was my bill. Very controversial bill. Probably come up in the campaign. And Pataki vetoed it because he wanted the D.A.’s to have input even though the corrections commissioners could call the DA. But it meant that Pataki – even though it passed the democratic assembly and the republican senate. I had the bill. Done. Not bad. Pataki vetoed it and he wanted to amend it and I said, “No, let it go, we’ll do it this year.” Sometimes you’ve just gotta say, “OK, you lose the bill” but sometimes you say, “Ok this is the best I can get.” That’s being a good legislator.

Sometimes you hit the streets, as we did when the Klan came here or when the police brutality issues came up. I recognized that it was important for someone who looked like me to be out there because we had to show that it was not just the minority community that was concerned but we had to show that the white community was concerned and some people had to step out there.

Sometimes you have to do that, but then you’ve also got to go to Albany, and you’ve got to pass the 48 hour rule and you have to keep fighting for the ban bill on residency. This role here is not just being
an advocate out on the streets or doing a Sunday press conference – which I’m good at also – it’s multifaceted.

Then you use the power. You want to talk about how we build communities, especially in minority neighborhoods – city planning commission. What kind of infrastructure planning do we have in the Harlem community when all the development after 96th street, we don’t have enough sewage treatment and toilet hookups and things like that so residents in Harlem will want to develop – who have their own community plans are being told, “but you can’t do it because the treatment facilities can’t handle it.” Or parts of East New York that cry out for economic development attention. And what about subsidies for those communities and community based organizations. That’s the hidden secret of the public advocate’s office to me.
SS: You roll up your sleeves and you get involved in zoning and you become an expert on how things are built in this town and you work with the unions and the construction trades and you talk about how we collectively build affordable housing. Now that in addition to police brutality and other issues will impact the two-thirds, the diverse parts of this city that cries out for some of those services and that piece of the pie. And I think I understand that – and it’s not the issues that are going to get you on New York 1 in the morning …. it’s not the issues that you are going to come saying I want to do a profile on you for … but at the end of four years if that’s what builds up neighborhoods and toned down the violence and toned down the tension. And then we got to deal with other issues, you know it’s not just job creation for communities. It’s not just opening up the store anymore and saying I’m going to give the poor community jobs. It’s also about ownership and how are we going to give people ownership of this town? The best way you do that is by giving ownership of small businesses and what are the programs of this new e-commerce, new technology that allows people of color to have the same advantages as other folks who have been here, you know, people who have had those advantages in other ethnic groups. Let’s do it all.

And that’s the hidden power of the public advocate’s office. How to use those powers for leverage, to leverage that stuff. That’s reasonable. That’s what I’m going to concentrate on. We’re going to have a unit on land use. We’re going to talk about economic development and job use. Some people want to sue a lot. And I’ll have lawyers to sue, but I also want to build real programs that can last way beyond you know my term as public advocate.

MTK: [philosophical question, open ended]

SS: I think this job is exciting, innovative, creative. I’m more motivated about running because of the whole change in city government. I believe that we need a generational change here. Of the good candidates who are running for public advocate – I respect each and every one of them and I think each one will do a good job. I just bring something different for this time right now which is real change and something new. But it’s a stepping stone like anything. I may decide to get reelected. I really want to do this job. But I enjoy what I do now. I like to serve. I think it’s exciting to have a larger constituency, to do more. Not having a speaker. To go into city council even though your presiding with no power. You can look in issues not just micro but macro issues.

Mark handles 30,000 complaints a year … try to do more of that. I want to ask: Why is everyone complaining about HPD? Why are we seeing trends in this agency? Then we’ll go to town. That’s what’s exciting about this job. If you do a good job well, …

MTK: Real change could happen.

[but seven months later, two planes flew into the World Trade Centers, contravening democracy at the most basic level]

An Interview with Norman Siegel, Executive Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union Sunday, February 11, 2001. At an “Open House” for an office on 72nd street on the upper west side of Manhattan run by an organization called, Friends of Norman Siegel, where there are documents that read, in part, “Norman Siegel for Public Advocate 2001” and a petition for the same at the door.

NORMAN SIEGEL: … it’s exciting. I’ve never done this before. You read about people running for office. You see films about it … and the balloons, and the people, and here it is. I’m in the middle of it. So often I think, “How did I get here?” But I’m excited.

MTK: But this shouldn’t seem foreign to you insomuch as you deal with politicians all the time.

NS: I deal with politicians all the time but the implication here is now I’m becoming one and that kind of concerns me on one level because I’ve always been critical of politicians myself. The main thing is politicians generally don’t answer questions. They’re disingenuous. They’re delusional at times, and I just have to make sure that I remember who I am; what my roots are, what my principles are, and try to answer the questions even when they are difficult ones. Generally speaking I’ve done that all my life as an advocate and in fact I think I’ve been the private advocate and now I want to be the public advocate.

MTK: But couldn’t you be losing power in a way (given that the position is weak)? If not, do you think of yourself as a progressive candidate, and if so, how do you think you will evolve the office if elected Public Advocate?

NS: Well the first thing .. I don’t think I’m, quote, “losing any power.” I mean, I think that I had these yearnings to take what I did at the Civil Liberties Union in Legal Services for the last 23 years in New York and apply it in a larger setting. Perhaps a less supportive ideological setting and test to see whether or not what I’ve been successful at with the Civil Liberties Union and Legal Services can be applied in a larger setting. What that means is I can now take on issues like education, immigrant rights, health issues, housing issues. The number of issues is going to expand substantially. I mean at the Civil Liberties Union we always had to deal with constitutional rights and, “Is it a test case.” Here, any issue is up for grabs. Which is the transition to the second part. I think Mark [Green, current and first elected public advocate] did a relatively good job. I think I would like to continue what he did but expand it. I’ve never been an “in the box” personality. And I don’t think I’ll be an “in the box” personality here–I’ll stretch it. I’m an activist. I am a progressive. I better be able to continue my activism and my progressive views. I’m assuming that that will happen. If it turns out that that doesn’t happen then I better take stock because that’s part of my assumption. I’m 57 years old now. I’m kind of silently proud of who I am, what I’ve done, the people I’ve represented. I’ve been tested a lot of times, and I’ve generally done OK. And that’s in a private way, when I go home at 11, 12 at night and I gotta look in the mirror, I gotta be OK with me and, generally speaking, I am. So knowing that, I want to enter this other arena which has a lot, a lot, of problems. When I watched what was happening in Florida and the betrayal of democracy in America, watching young people becoming more and more cynical, more and more alienated, it occurred to me that maybe I have to step into this arena and try to inspire and motivate young people. That it’s not all that way. In a lot of speeches I’ve been giving I’ve been telling people, “We need to dare to continue to dream about how it should be rather than how it is.”

MTK: I’m very fearful that this kind of a message is fading in importance. When you are out talking to people do you think there is a renewed feeling for public service there?

NS: Not yet. Not yet. And what I am hoping is that I can succeed in doing it in a nontraditional way–putting together the multiracial coalition of New Yorkers that I’m convinced want to come together across racial lines, but haven’t had the opportunity yet to do that because the failure of leadership to provide the climate, the atmosphere, the opportunity so that people from the black, the brown, the red, the yellow the white community can begin to learn about each other. We all stereotype each other because we don’t know each other. And we continue to do that because no one is prepared to take on this radioactive issue. One of the reasons I run? I want to begin a citywide dialogue on race. I want to begin to talk about it frankly. Racism in New York is not like it was in the deep South when I went there in the sixties. Racism in New York is subtle. It’s sophisticated. But it exists.

MTK: Do you think it’s institutional?

NS: Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. There’s a legacy of racism in many of the…just take the NYPD, who I’ve been battling for years. That’s an institutional problem, it’s not just an individual problem. It’s systemic.

MTK: So don’t you think there’ll be a great deal of resistance to what you’re saying?

NS: Of course, but you see, I think post-Louima, -Diallo, and -Dorismond … and Bush. I’ve been at many, many community meetings … Staten Island, Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx. I think there’s a majority of New Yorkers, across racial and geographical lines, that want to come together on racial lines to develop a common agenda to take on certain issues like at the Police Department, at the Board of Education, Housing … I mean, all of these–Housing, Education, Police–they all have enormous racial overtones. A lot of it stems from stereotyping. So if you begin to talk about it, if you begin to address it and identify people across racial lines who want to talk about it and want to realistically ameliorate it, I think we can do it. We haven’t had our civil rights movement here in New York, we had a southern civil rights movement but we haven’t had one here. So if I become the public advocate, I have an enormous bully pulpit, and as a white guy, I can be talking about race issues. It shouldn’t only be blacks or Latinos talking about race. White folks, it’s our problem too. So I want to use the position as a vehicle, to kind of shake it up. I was kidding when we just cut the ribbon out there that I got the “Shake it Up” party endorsement this afternoon. We want to try to excite young people, yet we also want to reach everybody so that people begin to realize that we don’t have to accept the status quo. Even on the most transient issue, which is race, in my opinion. I think we can make progress. And I think there are so many people in New York who want to come together, but when you’ve got a mayor like Rudy Giuliani, you can’t come together. In fact, he divides people. Here’s a guy who doesn’t even feel comfortable with blacks and Latinos in the room. Well, I’ve had many African-American, Latino, and Asian clients and I have become educated and sensitized for 35 years of being with people of color and white folks. And I like when there’s a mix. If it’s all homogenous, I’m not comfortable. New York is not homogenous. It has diversity and we should build upon that and realize the pluses out of that. Now, is it hard? You bet, it’s hard. It’s hard, first, because people have already given up. But I’m young, I’m energetic. There’s a lot of other people. I’ve got the black and Latino police officers with me. I’ve got the cab drivers who are with me. Those are powerful people.

MTK: I think the census results in April are going to show us remarkable numbers in the electorate.

NS: Sixty percent are people of color, at a minimum, maybe a third. Well, on the police, two thirds of the cops are white. And I’ve got statistics from a couple of years ago: 5.7% of the captains were people of color. And that says it in a nutshell. Three percent of the fire department is African-American. People don’t even know this kind of stuff. It’s gotten to the point in New York where people don’t even know what to do about race. I think the reality is we’re all prejudiced. We have to acknowledge that and then begin to deal with it. What equality is about is that you treat people equally. And we don’t know how to do that in New York. And so I want to try to do that. How are we going to do it? We’re going to try to create independent neighborhood councils where people will come together and they will begin to talk to each other, learn from each other. What their cultures are, what their mores are. We have cab drivers who are Sikhs, and people don’t know why they wear a turban. If you explain to people why they wear a turban, then they will understand what that is. If people understand what people’s customs and religious practices are, they might be more tolerant and respectful of that. But if there’s no one who’s trying to create that dialogue, is it any wonder that we continue to stereotype each other? So one of the most important things I want to do is exactly that. I can’t do that from the ACLU. So I take the risk. I leave something that I love, that I do very well at and take this plunge to kind of see whether or not this can work. What I think–and so far it’s only been five weeks that I’ve been doing this–but people are receptive to it. But I don’t want to be delusional or misleading myself. This is hard. This is a cynical town. This is a tough town. But being the public advocate, in my mind, is being the people’s lawyer. I’ve been doing that all my life. A lot of people—thank God–trust me, and I think if I can take that and parlay it into this new arena, it could be special and it could be exciting and, most important, we might make a difference. If I can do it, then maybe other people will step up to the plate and do it as well. You shouldn’t have to be rich to run for office and you shouldn’t have to know all the people in power to run for office. I’m still the outsider. I’m running against five people, four of whom are kind of insiders. Three who are career politicians. But the Office of Public Advocate, it seems to me, is unique, and it seems to me I’m a perfect fit for it. So I try it, and if we win it’s great. We’re gonna have fun. We’re gonna be witty, we’re gonna be irreverent. We’re gonna be very activist, and if we raise enough money we’ll be able to get our message out and if we get our message out I think we’ll win.

MTK: And what about the mayor’s office? A progressively minded candidate relies on a person being in the mayor’s seat that is at least not opposed to that and, at best, welcomes it. Who among the candidates do you think you’d work well with and, conversely, who would you say might create a problem like the one we’ve had, if we do have a problem between the offices of Mayor and Public Advocate?

NS: Well, it’s a no-brainer: Any one of the four Democrats–Ferrer, Hevesi, Green, and Vallone. No one will be as bad as Giuliani was. So that’s a no-brainer. I think that any one of those four could win and–in an ironic way–I’ve gone after a lot of politicians, been very critical of them, and for whatever reason, all these four, I get along well with. So from my perspective I can work with any one of them. Assuming they want to work with the public advocate. And obviously that would be the ideal situation. But I also think the public advocate should be independent of the mayor. For example, I will not endorse any of them. Because I think the public advocate should be the monitor of the mayor. If you have a cozy relationship, and you endorse one of them to win, I’m not sure you can have that independence. If you know the person and you’re friendly with the person and you work with the person, generally it’s hard to be critical of the person. And I think the public advocate has to have good working relationships but has to be separate and independent. I believe independence is the key issue in this. So I will not endorse any of them. I will be friendly with all of them. I will encourage them to do progressive, inclusionary things, but I won’t endorse any one of them at this point.

MTK: It’s very early.

NS: It’s very early. I haven’t even declared yet.

MTK: When I rang, I was calling to find out if you were going to.

NS: We opened this storefront because we want a visible place. We want it accessible; people have been coming in all week. And then, I have to figure out … I’m on leave from the Civil Liberties Union so between now and March I’ll have to decide whether or not I’m going to resign and then, if I do that, then I’ll declare and then I’ll get out there and start the campaigning and I’m looking forward to the campaigning because it’s basically interacting with people and that could be fun. I’m aware that some people see me as someone who could be different than any other politician. And I like that perception, but being realistic and thoughtful about this, I gotta make sure that I can be different. I don’t know exactly what that means. I’ve been at a few events so far and, for example, a lot of the candidates get up and they talk about, “I did this, I did this. I’m on this committee, I’m on that committee.” I get up and I just talk about the issues, and the message I’ve been mainly telling people is that no one, no one should ever accept anything short of full and complete equality, justice, and freedom. And this is a town that hasn’t done that for a lot of people: racial, gender, sexual-orientation, economics. So I can be a vehicle and a symbol and a catalyst to try to address the inequalities that exist in the city and not just, you know, about a pothole or a streetlight, although that’s important to people, but we’re talking about institutional racism. We’re talking about institutional discrimination based on socioeconomic status. And I want to take that on.

MTK: With term limits there are lots of seats available; something like 46 seats are coming up. Are you encouraging other people who are, as you say, outsiders, to participate?

NS: I am doing that. There’s a guy, Hiram Montserrat, who is the first elected Latino official in Queens. And he got elected as a district leader recently and he is running for city council. I have personally given him a check, and I’ve gone to a couple of events, and I’ve endorsed him. Friday night, Adonis Rodriguez, who is from the Dominican Students Union, whom I represented. He’s decided to run for city council. I went up there, gave him a check, and made a speech for him. There were 300 people Friday night in a church in Washington Heights. I bet you two-thirds of those folks have never participated in electoral politics. And we were talking about a progressive coalition of people who are going to run and are going to try to make history in New York. So that’s starting to happen right now. My criteria is: Are people social justice people? Are they people that I’ve worked with before and can I trust them? And finally, are they the only one in the race that meet those criteria? If there are two people I won’t choose one over the other. But I will try to help and encourage people not only to run but to help some of the people win. And finally, in the Democratic party–there’s no reason why a Democratic party where the registration is like five to one, should ever have someone like a Rudy Giuliani ever get elected in the city of New York again. So what happened to the Democratic party? I would like if it all works with new people, new blood, new vision … rejuvenate the Democratic party. On the other hand, as I say, I have to be respectful of my elders, people who are experienced, to make sure they don’t think I’ve been disrespecting them. Now it seems to me and I’ve said to some of the Democratic leaders, “You should open the doors and welcome us in.” Now if they don’t open the doors and welcome us in, then you have to figure out alternative structures. But I would like to work with people rather than have to create alternative structures, but if you have to create alternative structures in order to deal with social justice issues, as we’ve done before in movements, we’ll do that within electoral politics as well. And the last thing, as I mentioned before, is the young people. We’ve got to make sure that we don’t lose because of cynicism.

With this storefront, on Sundays at 3 o’clock we’re going to have speakers come in. And we’re going to try to attract young people so that they learn about issues–and that they can make a difference. Young people have made a difference historically. We’re going to have a lot of young people–high school students, college students–working with us, and trying to encourage them to be involved, and then maybe there’s a new generation of leaders to come … And–we gotta make sure–black, brown, red, yellow, and white, together. That’s my battle cry. We gotta include everybody. This has to be inclusionary. New York is great, but there are a lot of people who have been left out. And what we have to do, the people of my generation, now, is to make sure that we can assure people that they will be included more and that this city–it’s theirs as well as other people’s city. We don’t want to be excluding anyone, we want to include everybody.

MTK: There’s nothing wrong with it, but I think you need to be careful.

NS: This is the people’s arena. What politics is about is interacting with people, all kinds of people. Everyone has a vote. So if you’re a skilled pol, you make sure that in fact you listen to everyone, you touch everybody. That hasn’t happened a lot. Too much of politics today is on the TV ads and there’s no direct contact, there’s no street contact, there’s no grassroots development. We’re gonna do that. We’re gonna do it with passion, we’re gonna do it with excitement, and I think that by the time the primary rolls around on September 11, if we succeed, this could be the start of something very exciting.

MTK: Last question. If you don’t succeed, would you run as an independent?

NS: Oh, I haven’t even thought about that yet. I think that since this is all new to me, I’ll just take one step at a time and see what happens. And obviously the answer will be: Hopefully, I won’t have to get to that hypothetical because we’ll win. This is not quixotic. This is to win.

[in 2001, during the primaries, I began interviewing all the candidates for Public Attorney because it was a historic shift in power for the position, but, exactly seven months after this interview, on September 11th, election day was cancelled because two planes were flown into the two tallest buildings in NYC, contravening democracy at its most basic level.

In the aftermath, Norman Siegel and Scott Stringer was crushed by Betsy Gotbaum for the position of PA and Michael Bloomberg became Mayor, stealing the election from either Fernando Ferrer or Mark Green]

The Voting Chamber was an art installation at Movements Gallery in Austin, TX, six blocks from Governor George Bush’s Mansion, and the exhibition was open during the Super Tuesday Presidential Primaries of Election 2000 and the South x Southwest (SXSW) Arts and Music Festival of that year.

I flew into Austin from Brooklyn and immediately went to a local chapter meeting of an anti-death penalty group and introduced myself publicly as an artist planning to do an installation at Movements Gallery on 6th Street:

A MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION IN PROXIMITY TO THE TEXAS GOVERNOR’S MANSION

THE STATE OF TEXAS EXECUTES MORE PEOPLE THAN ANY OTHER JURISDICTION IN THE WESTERN WORLD. THE CURRENT GOVERNOR OF TEXAS (1994-2000) HAS OVERSEEN THE EXECUTION OF MORE PEOPLE THAN ALL FIVE PREVIOUS GOVERNORS TAKEN TOGETHER. HE IS CURRENTLY RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND EXECUTING AT LEAST 18 MORE PEOPLE.

ACCORDING TO A TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY STUDY, MOST TEXANS FAVOR ALTERNATIVES TO THE DEATH PENALTY OR ARE UNDECIDED:

“THE VOTING CHAMBER” HAS BEEN DESIGNED BY NEW YORK-BASED FORMER TEXAS RESIDENT AND UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS GRADUATE M.T. KARTHIK, TO PROVIDE A PLACE TO REHEARSE FOR THE UPCOMING PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES AND ELECTIONS.

“No Real Choice 2000” was installed on the wall opposite top of the stairs to Gallery space. The 33’ wall was painted sympathetic to currently existing artwork in gallery while extending the theme of the canvas, including:

“The Voting Chamber,” a simulated voting booth: U-shaped curtain rod with a red curtain. This curtain is to be drawn around individual viewers to simulate a voting booth and allow a private viewing space of the canvas and of specific propaganda material. A looped, repeating audio component of the attorney of one of those on Death Row was played next to an empty chair.

The stairwell from the street to the Gallery floor and the sidewalks from the Governor’s Mansion to the gallery door (as practicable) were marked to point to the booth and to present statistics (see Statistics that follow) regarding the death penalty in Texas.

It’s taken me more than eight years to write anything of what happened in Austin in the Spring of 2000. I installed The Voting Chamber and came to find out that Odell Barnes, Jr., was scheduled to die though likely innocent of the murder of which he was convicted.

The installation included an empty chair with the name “Mr. Bush” taped to the back, sitting beside a cassette player that continuously played a ten-minute audio loop of Mr. Barnes’ lawyer explaining that he needed more time to present the strong evidence of a frame-up he had discovered in Odell’s case.

The installation inspired a march of hundreds in Austin who chanted as they marched around the Governor’s Mansion against the Death Penalty:

This all occurred during the Super Tuesday Presidential Primaries as George W. Bush, the Governor of Texas, fought Arizona Senator John McCain for the Republican nomination, Spring 2000. The installation was up during the SXSW music festival, and the venue was a site for the Austin festival so thousands saw it.

George W. Bush and The State of Texas murdered the innocent 22-year-old, Odell Barnes, Jr. on March 1st of the year 2000. The message was clear as Bush ran for President on an active record of becoming the single individual Governing the execution of more people in U.S. history.

Odell Barnes, Jr.s’ last meal request was for “justice, equality and world peace,”

and his last words were:

“I thank you for proving my innocence although it has not been acknowledged in the courts. May you continue in the struggle and may you change all that’s been done here today and in the past.”

Nine months later, George W. Bush was appointed President of the United States by the Supreme Court – contravening democracy at the most basic level – thanks to massive problems with vote counting and issues of voter suppression in the State of Florida, where Bush’s own brother, Jeb, was Governor.

The canvas “No Real Choice 2000,” finished two months before the election, was startlingly prophetic.

The 12th annual Anti-Gentrification Festival will begin here in a minute. There are tables being set up all through the intersection and the first crackly, then tinny, over-trebled and finally thuddy-bass-ed, and slightly more balanced sound of a PA of some kind kicks through the residential buildings at this corner. The kids are all setting up different stands and tables outside as I write.

I want to do some straight chronicling of the events of yesterday because the day was so full of activity and information. Let me get my coffee and a little more comfortable for the direct reportage process.

<Break> There is a relationship between B. and I as colleagues. He is a writer of the daily. He is a reporter. He is a member of the press and he attempts to work within that structure. I am a writer, too. The type of writing I do is at a different tempo, set at wide, broad strokes over years. Instead of the daily or the column-oriented construction of events into a format for a daily deadline, I create my own deadlines and parameters for describing and reporting on my world, at long-term estimation periods.

Yet we have so many things in common. We take coffee and read the paper. We are regular in our approach to the machine. We keep orderly notations and structures. Writers are a funny lot, but it is easy to pick one out when you’ve got one in your sights. B. understands I’m a writer and so he provides a vantage point, coffee, the paper, simple things. And a complex thing, too, for with the capacity to switch media like this I can capture much more than with just the field notes.

Here in the United States where so many things (everything?) are about money and its exchange, here in a capitalized society it is difficult to explain why I am able to use B.’s gear or coffee or he, mine. In the world of the arts this question does not arise. As an artist, we are communist by definition. We have to commune in order to create in a meaningful way. And so we try to order our efforts so the least amount of the fabric of the lives of others is required to allow us to participate to create the highest degree of impact or affect the highest degree of contact with others.

If a pen is the only thing I can afford, what is the most powerful thing I can make with it? What is the most powerful thing I can say? If I have access to a computer? Or a video outfit?

The tools are merely media. One of the most stupid things to do is to glorify the tools themselves.

The issue of how to use them is the decision of the artist who takes his task seriously and approaches with an organized effort. Right now I am in New York. This aspect of the process requires me to be here, now and to wait. So I’m trying to get what I can of the time.

I chronicle and report and keep the process going in whatever way possible. I attempt to get to places and see things and try to document to the best of my abilities what I experience. I am also trying to do something very different from journalists like Bob who participate in a language upon which his colleagues attempt to agree.

I am participating in a way in which I want to make language into a tool as well. I want to bend and angle and break it if I have to in order to present what I feel is an accurate portrayal (in metaphor) of the me I was when I was experiencing the things I describe.

This includes an attempt to completely embrace subjective-ism. It is to turn subject into object. And collect with language. This is the tempo of the kind of writing which I do.

For B., the writing itself and the perspectives represented take a back seat to the deadline and the result is the beauty of having a regular, ordered, ouevre of work over a long period of time (so beautiful) which requires, patience, discipline and dedication, not to mention the ability to tolerate editors, publishers and untold other interveners on a daily basis (no small thing – I CANNOT DO IT RIGHT NOW). He embraces and accepts the natural limitations of the form. I admire him his ability to do this, but I do not wish it for the world.

Well, let us begin shall we?

Yesterday morning I awoke to the beautiful sounds of South Indian music and singing as H., the Indian woman with whom I am staying, (who has been so kind and good to me since my arrival by accident in her lap in the street unknown, by “accident,” three weeks ago … see previous entries) awoke, showered and readied herself for her job to which she must go every morning at 8:30.

We chatted briefly about meeting up later in the day for a reading by two authors at a space downtown. She had the directions at the office and so I told her I’d call her there later and she left. I arose, drew a hot bath and took up a few of the fashion magazines which the woman from whom H. is subletting the apartment keeps on her windowsill. It’s the first time I’d ever read any of these magazines which are such a huge part of the literature in this country.

There I was, 30, bearded, shaved head, in a hot bath, listening to music, reading Marie Clare, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vanity Fair. The perspectives are on pop cultural issues and generally from a woman’s point of view, though not exclusively. It was amusing to spend a morning on the upper-east side this way, despite being broke and unemployed. I am truly blessed and fortunate to have good friends and help with this process.

<Break>

So yesterday, I arose and read in the tub and sat about thinking for a while. Went to the Scoop and Grind Cafe for a coffee and a bagel. I have taken to the place. I am able to sit outside and enjoy the people passing and have a tall hazelnut coffee with two shots of espresso and an “everything” bagel with cream cheese all for $3.50.

I spend the time reading the papers and so on. Ted Turner, the billionaire entertainment and communications mogul has given the United Nations (the UN), one billion dollars. The amount is the largest contribution of its kind anywhere, ever. It’s absolutely phenomenal, and people seem to take it with hardly a thought. It’s as if a billion has become meaningless. But it isn’t.

The trouble is, what will the distribution of that billion dollars yield? Political power for the unempowered worker in Bangladesh? Ted Turner gives $1 billion to the UN and the next day a worker in India who is fifty times brighter than a worker in a McDonald’s in Biloxi, Mississippi, makes $3 a day in kind, not in cash and is able to eat a decent meal and feed his family.

Meanwhile the wages here in the US are spent on Tazmanian devil t-shirts and plastic toys.

Waste. Consumption. The false value of stupid objects designed by others to appear valuable but which are in fact cheap, and non-lasting. Will Ted Turner’s money fix that? It’s a problem which has gone on for fifty years untended and is, in some cases, worsening, more waste, more consumption.

New York is about money … I have heard people talk about how much they like making it, spending it, earning it, working for it, cheating others out of it, having it. It is honestly at the heart of many of the discussions here. It is the American, capitalized sensibility at its oldest and most evolved – New York, where people have come from every god-damn place and hacked out an existence. By using money. By attributing value to money.

But what a life. Is it a valuable life? Or is it devoid of meaning? (As one New York lifer told to me, “I cannot sleep where it is quiet, in the country, I have been around this noise all my life. My fear is that … I don’t know if it is a good thing. I don’t know if I don’t want it to be different. I am afraid that it is unhealthy.”)

And another have actually said, “I live to make money. I’m like a pit-bull when it comes to money.” What meaning is there in the earning of money for its own sake? Ted Turner gives away a billion and says it was like he gave away the earnings for the nine months of the year. “I’m no worse off than last year,” he suggests. It’s crazy. The inequity of wealth in this society as a function of the value of money- No. … the subjective value of money.

If you choose to care about money, if you choose to value it and you work your ass off and you are lucky and you have certain advantages like a good family or connections, it STILL isn’t a guarantee you will have money, security or satisfaction or happiness. It is something a person could spend a whole lifetime doing and have wasted a life. True contentment comes from within. Money is a manufactured construct, made to sate our desire for material happiness, security and contentment … but it requires enslavement.

Freedom is worth more than money.

Real freedom. The freedom to be unencumbered by society’s groping need for your expenditure. To participate as an individual for the collective good of the whole as you please, to reduce waste and participate. Does Ted Turner do this? His behavior night before last at the United Nations Awards dinner in his honor speaks to it. His gift is an enormously powerful and important one. Now to see if capitalists will learn from this the importance of supporting those in our society who do not accept money or capitalism.

The paper also reviewed the new exhibit at the Solomon Guggenheim Museums here in New York which opened to private reception night before last and was opened to the public yesterday. The exhibit is an enormously encompassing retrospective of the works of Robert Rauschenberg, now 71 year-old artist who was born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1925 and moved to New York in 1949.

He was educated at the Black Mountain school in the late 40’s and early 50’s and this yields some thought about his cohort and his own work. He was a student of Albers and participated with the encouragement of John Cage and Jasper Johns. The influence of both is very much present in his work and self-referentialism of the era – in literature as well as arts and music – must be addressed.

It is at this time that Charles Olson and Robert Creeley began the correspondence of which so much has been written, collected, and discussed. It has been posited that the Black Mountain School produced this movement of thought and idea which was named by its writers and energized by its artists and musicians. In order for it to be valid a a movement, however, the artists and so on must produce at length with comparative relationships. This seems to have happened.

The first use of the term “post-modern,” is attributed to the Creeley-Olson relationship. Surrounded by such artists as Johns, Rauschenberg and Cage it is no wonder the naming took this path. The Black Mountain School of thought can it be called? How do we go past it?

The Guggenheim has taken an amazing step toward solidifying the reputation of this school of thought.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s stuff is everywhere, six floors of the main space uptown at 5th and 89th and also in the downtown gallery and at another site. I have only seen three floors of the main hall’s dedication to R’s work.

fantastically broad usage of mixed-media and the incredible productivity of this fellow! He made so much art between 1949, when he arrived in New York at the age of 24 to 1965, still in New York but with many many many overseas trips and attempts to his credit by 40 years of age. 16 years and an amazing amount of work.

It is an impressive and vast collection. The use of mixed-media of such a wide variety (from gold leaf to photocopied images to photography to paints and drawings and blown glass and worked metal and text-and-image based stuff and lithographs and sculpture – taxidermified animals for God’s sake!) filled me with thoughts of Warhol, Johns, Cage and others a lot, but they were all contemporaries.

His use of the Mona Lisa as a photocopied image incorporated into another piece in 1952! That impressed me as important with regard to image appropriation and manipulation. It was so long ago. Photography was in its middle years. Rauschenberg was at least incredibly productive. And he was innovative, and he had a wonderful sense of taste, especially for texture (I’m using past tense and he’s not dead, but I haven’t really seen the stuff past 1971 or so … BTW, The De Kooning Retrospective in 1996-autumn was a much different type of show. This thing can’t possibly travel this way, I think, but it will. This is New York City. Here you can do anything.)

The generation of artists who precede my arrival in New York with movements (before Arthur Danto’s “Death of Art”) have huge institutions in their favor now. But they didn’t when they were my age. How can I make progress in this process now? What is the key to understanding how to make a relationship with my community which allows me to create for a living? Join the communities’ institutions? Should I become a member of the Guggenheim? Of the Met? Of the monied? Can’t. I’m broke. All I do is write. Hmmmmmmm.

After the Guggenheim (there are field notes in the New York Black Journal #1 – dated, 9/17/97ce) I walked down to H.’s place and had a couple of glasses of Yago (a cheap Sangria that’s tolerable when poured over ice) and sat down to roll three joints for the evening. My joint-rolling skills are terrible, but here in New York, the common practice for pot-smoking is the joint and no paraphernalia. I have learned this from a number of sources – it is considered west-coasty and read wimpy to use pipes and bongs … joints are the NYC way … how funny to learn these things at 30 …

I got a call from D. who wanted to get together for a drink. Kate is in town and I have blown her off pretty hard by not participating for the sake of my own vulnerability and so on. D. had arranged for us to meet her late tonight at an event.

D. and I agreed to meet at the sushi/bar at the corner of my block and so I finished rolling three joints, smoked half of one, and made my way down to the corner. D. was late and so I sat at the bar and had some sushi and a gin and tonic and wrote for a while (Field Notes Available – not important, some notes, “New York City: It’s a distrac- … (beat) … It’s god-damned all a big-ass distraction.” and others)

<Break> For a phone call from S. <Break>

That said let me return to last night …

After sushi, D. and I caught the 6 to the Drawing Center for the readings to be held there. The Drawing Center is at 35 Wooster Avenue and houses a gallery space (I had heard of it before because, Glenn Seator, whom I met through Sebastian, who constructed his piece at the Capp Street Gallery in San Francisco, has shown his work at the Drawing Center – Seator was in the last Whitney Biennial). The space is long and rectangular and well lit. It has good, large windows in the front of the shop, and a nice-sized space within which to show.

The readings were by Anita Desai, someone else, and Amitav Ghosh. D. and I arrived late and so we missed Desai and came in the middle of the second reader whose name I didn’t get and caught all of Amitav Ghosh who read from his new novel, “The Calcutta Chromosome,” reviewed positively by the New York Times as a complex, spiritual thriller-detective-type thing (NYTBR, two weeks ago when I first arrived).

The second-reader had a younger, faster-paced, style with pops and whistles. He had all the elements of Indo-Anglian writers of the day, exotic settings (to english ears) and rhythmic approaches to the blending of languages and so on. I wasn’t able to follow his reading so well, it lulled me because he had such little variation in his tone of voice as he read. He was listless. The audience, was polite and laughed when led to laughter. I think oral presentations are supposed to be different experiences from reading the book itself. I mean, here they are in front of a group and all.

They feel as if they are written to fit into a pre-defined structure ordained by the industry for Indo-Anglian writers. I know that’s terrible to say, especially about my contemporaries, but what are we building that’s original? I ask knowing the answer … little and everything. We are original. We are the new Indians. We can’t help but be contemporary and original. It’s never happened before, this thing.

Amitav Ghosh read from his novel which was available at the front of the gallery, beautiful jacket, case-bound, lovely job, by Avon Books … I was able to follow along in the text as he read which was a great benefit to the experience.

His work is slower-paced and more even. It is much more traditional. I mean in style, but not in content. In content he has woven and toyed with ideas. But the style is long and drawn and traditional. I think his use of adjectives and adjectival phrases (much like the younger fellow before him) relies too much on Indian-ness … but perhaps this is because I am an Indian … (am I? Only there, then … where? when?)

Marvelously developed thoughts, though, and ideas.

H. and her brother and others went for food afterward and D. and I went on to the D-film festival at the Kitchen (by cab).

The Kitchen is a performance art space on 19th at 10th streets … past chelsea in the middle of noplace. It was cool. I mean a good, black, dark-ass space with lighting available. But not so many people were there. Still what a weird event, to see K. in NYC and to be at a film festival from SF touring the US and here in NYC first.

Most of the high-tech digital filmmaking is SF, LA, California … this year’s festival had several New York entrants and two of the guys were present. It was good to see. Content was limited. I mean most of it was cutes-y and damn near vaudevillian. But there were one or two which took interestng approaches. There was one called, “Amend,” no plot, all image and spyrographic crazy beautiful trip through music … lovely and well-done.

Others of interest … but lots of cartoony-type stuff … what’s the point? That isn’t content … one guy did Dreamboy and it was because as he put it, “I saw the South Park stuff and figured I could do that … so I did …”… it’s good, it’s funny, its impressive, but it’s got obscene jokes and silly content … mass-market … cool, whatever … you know?

There was 120 minutes of shorts and then a last extra … it was long and the chairs were hard and uncomfortable and all … but I mean it was cool to see the “cutting edge,” of computer-based technology utilized by its makers. Give me content anyday though!!!! Not even necessarily linear.

So afterward we went to a bar, had a drink, K. and I smoked out before and after the gig and in the street and wherever we pleased.

After D-film we went to Mark Summer’s place and saw a few of his films and saw K. in one … it was good to do. Afterward D. and I had food and caught the 1 to his place. I got here at 4:00 a.m.

Now it’s Saturday and the Anti-Gentrification fest is rolling loud outside D.’s place!!!

Gotta go. That wraps up my description of my yesterday … 8:30 a.m. to 4:11 a.m. … damn near 20 hours on my third weekend in New York.

This was a very disappointing edit and when it appeared, I was enraged. My name was spelled wrong – and it’s the third typo on the page!

The first is in the image where the images of his work are labelled, “(Rigo)” – which isn’t his name, and shows the overactive hand of the newly minted fashion magazine’s editors –

whose next immediate typo is in the HEADLINE – an extra apostrophe where it should be “Maos”. The piece is also edited considerably from what I submitted and the editors took liberties adding and removing text that changed the meaning of full paragraphs. But anyway here is how it ran:

I began a friendship and apprenticeship with Rigo after this November interview, in the year 1996, which lasted ten years.